Chapter 5

Evan

“What the fuck, man?” Roger said, shaking his head. “It’s a bloodbath out there.”

Despite Kleinman’s rousing speech that morning, there was not much to be done that day. The top executives were in damage-control mode, on the phone with our investors, conveying to them the same confident lines we’d just heard. But everyone else had too much time on their hands. Taking slow walks around the floor, calling their wives in the middle of the day. Roger staring, slack-jawed, at the computer screen. The eerie quiet was only punctured by his occasional declarations of disbelief, which I did my best to tune out, because I was the anomaly. I actually had work to do. This lumber deal was taking up every second of my time.

Roger noticed me studying a model and chewing on a thumbnail. “What is that?” he said. “Peck. Are you actually working right now?”

“Just something, um, something leftover from a few days ago.”

Keep it light and vague, those were my orders. “Not till we’re ready to push the button,” Michael had said. “Soon. I know how hard you’ve been working on this, Evan. I’ve seen how late you’re staying and how early you’re coming in. I’m impressed. You’re handling this very well.”

This was the previous week, in Michael’s office, the beginning of September. I had stopped by to go over the latest numbers. I’d been working up the nerve to say something to Michael about the workload, which I could barely handle. In a bathroom stall that morning, I practiced the sentence in a whisper. My stomach was a watery mess. Michael, I wonder whether we want to think about bringing someone else on board. Couldn’t the deal use a fresh pair of eyes? That seemed a fair enough rationale.

But Michael had preempted me with praise before I had a chance to open my mouth. It was a cornering tactic. A dare. What was I going to do, tell Michael that his confidence was misplaced? That I actually wasn’t as capable as he thought I was? And risk getting kicked off the deal entirely? So instead I mumbled a thank-you.

“And I appreciate it,” Michael went on. “How discreet you’ve been. That’s the best way to handle a deal like this. Stay quiet. Just focus and do what you’re doing. Keep up the good work, Evan.”

So that was it. I was just going to put my head down and get through it. Just as I’d done in the past, taking it one predawn practice at a time, inching closer to the end. By eleven that Monday morning, the morning of Kleinman’s departure to DC, I had finished the latest component of the model. I walked the papers over to Michael’s office. There was an assumption in the formula that needed clarifying, the one part of the deal that still didn’t make sense to me. I was a little worried, actually. It was the last factor that seemed liable to screw everything up.

Michael’s secretary, Wanda, halted me outside his office. She was all sassy middle-age curves: blown-out hair, chair-wide hips, bright red lipstick. “Uh-uh,” she said in her Jersey accent. “I don’t think so, honey. You’re not getting in there today. You wanna give that to me, I’ll try to get it to him.”

I peered over Wanda’s shoulder, trying to see through the open door. She’d been with Michael for years, and she could be excessively protective. “What’s he doing?”

“Trying to run the company—what do you think? He’s been on the line all morning.” The phone on Wanda’s desk rang. She tapped her Bluetooth headset and jerked her head to dismiss me. “O-kay? Stop by tomorrow. Maybe I can fit you in.”

I couldn’t go any further on this model without Michael answering my question. So I spent the rest of the morning as Roger and the other analysts did, trolling the Internet for updates, killing time in an uneasy boredom, the same things I had done at the beginning of the summer. The TVs in the lounge were tuned to CNBC and Bloomberg Business. People lingered there, watching, looking for any excuse to stay away from their desks. Late in the afternoon, I walked past and found myself hypnotized by the mounting intensity of the coverage.

WALL STREET’S WORST DAY SINCE 9/11
DOW DOWN OVER 500 POINTS
LEHMAN DECLARES BANKRUPTCY
MERRILL BOUGHT BY BANK OF AMERICA
IS YOUR MONEY SAFE?
FORCED LIQUIDATION—HISTORIC VOLUME
EVERYTHING CALLED INTO QUESTION

One of the managing directors, a petite brunette woman, had her hands steepled over her mouth and tears in her eyes. Another woman put her arm around her shoulders. “Her husband works at AIG,” I heard someone whisper. “Three kids. Just bought a house in Quogue.”

Roger, standing across the lounge, caught my eye and waved me over. “Let’s go to the roof,” he said.

“What? Now?”

“Come on. It’s dead. No one’s gonna notice.”

We took the elevator to the top of the building, where Roger propped open the door with a loose brick. It was a beautiful day, a bluebird September sky. The city stretched out far below us, metal and glass glittering in the sunlight.

“Holy shit,” I said.

“You never been up here?”

“I had no idea we could get up here.”

“We’re not supposed to.” Roger pulled a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his pocket. “You want one?”

“I’m okay.”

I wandered out toward the edge. The roof was covered with tar paper and gravel. Only a low wall and a flimsy metal bar stood between me and the sixty-story drop. On the other side of the roof was the area where David Kleinman’s helicopter had taken off that morning.

From this vantage point, life down below was proceeding normally. Taxis and trucks flowed up 8th Avenue in waves. Tiny pedestrians drifted down the sidewalk, their motion smooth and toylike. Sounds echoed up from the street: honking horns, a jackhammer, the rattle of a loose manhole cover, a siren in the distance. I could almost pretend the crisis was contained within the walls of our building, the babble of the TV irrelevant beyond its perimeter. The numbers were plummeting, the market was in a frenzy, but for the moment, it didn’t result in any visible change. No fires, no earthquakes, no violence or bloodshed. But it would take time for the real world to catch up to what was happening on our screens, and in a situation like this, the worst lay ahead. I understood that.

That woman downstairs, trying not to show her panic: her husband would lose his job, and she would probably keep hers, but it didn’t matter. The balance would be upset. I knew that feeling, of living exactly within your means. Their life was fancier than mine—children in private school, a second house in the Hamptons—but that feeling didn’t change. The precarious flow of incoming and outgoing gave you a toehold in this world, but it was one that would vanish if the paychecks stopped. Numbers had always felt realer to me than anything else. Days like this reminded you of that.

To the rest of America, to the rest of the world, I was indisputably one of them, even if I hadn’t been pushing shady CDOs. A bad guy. A practitioner of the dark arts who had suddenly lost control of his slippery magic. Why didn’t this bother me more? In the past, I think it would have. But my mind kept going back to the numbers. You could talk in generalities: Wall Street bad, Main Street good. It didn’t really mean anything. I liked the economy of action. A goal scored before the third-period buzzer, a clean and precise pass, an airtight model. You didn’t need words to complicate it. There were winners, and there were losers. The game bore it out. At first this job seemed more practical than anything else: a way to stay in New York with Julia, to make money and pay off student loans quickly. But it had transformed into something else. The thing I was meant to be doing.

I shoved my hands in my pockets and turned, taking in the panorama. The city was sparkling and alive, taking up every inch it could. I looked back at Roger, leaning against the wall. He was moving his lips as he read something on his BlackBerry.

“What is it?” I asked, walking over.

“Shit. This is crazy.” Roger thrust his phone toward me. “You see that picture? No, scroll down. There. That short guy in the blue tie? That’s my old roommate from Stanford. What are the odds, man?”

“What is this?”

“He works at Lehman, I guess. The little shit is famous.”

“Actually, it looks like he just got fired.” I scrolled to the top, where the headline read: LEHMAN GOES UNDER. It was from the Observer. The picture showed several bewildered-looking young men standing on the sidewalk, clutching cardboard boxes while pedestrians streamed around them.

“Whatever. He was a tool.”

“How did you find this?”

“I always read the Observer. Just for their finance guy. He’s good. You never read him?”

“What’s his name?”

Roger reached for his phone, checking the byline. “Adam McCard.”

“Adam McCard?”

“What, are you deaf?”

“No. No, it’s just that I know Adam McCard.”

Roger raised an eyebrow. “How?”

“He was a friend of Julia’s in college. Really? Adam McCard?”

“He’s a good reporter. Better than anyone else. He actually seems to get it.”

“Shit. If you say so.”

Roger took a final drag of his cigarette. Adam McCard. I hadn’t thought about him in months—in years. “Ready?” Roger kicked the brick away and held the door open.

“Right behind you,” I said.

*  *  *

Sophomore year, Julia dragged me along to a party off campus. I was hungover and stiff from the night before, from the hockey team’s end-of-season rager, but Julia insisted I come. She was in one of those moods. The party was on a dark, tree-lined street, in a crumbling old Victorian with a sagging porch. She had given a vague explanation of the occasion—for the magazine she worked on? Something like that—but when we walked through the front door, I saw the real reason.

Adam McCard was leaning against the wall, arms crossed, one foot hitched up. He waved at Julia, then shook my hand, gripping it too tightly. He told us to help ourselves to the beer in the kitchen, his kitchen. I realized belatedly, stupidly, that this was his house. Julia had been mentioning Adam’s name a lot in the preceding weeks. I’d decided, a while earlier, that I hated him.

We joined a group in the kitchen gathered around a keg. They gave me curious looks. “Are you an athlete?” one girl asked. She was scrawny, black-clad, with a cigarette smoldering between her pale fingers and an expression of surprised wonder.

“I’m on the hockey team.”

“Oh,” Julia said. “Oh, that reminds me of something. So last night…”

I tuned out quickly. I was thinking, mostly, how hungry I was. Maybe I could slip out for a slice of pizza and get back before she noticed. But a minute later, Julia said my name. I turned to face her. She leaned against me, briefly, in recognition.

“So Sebi finally finishes the bottle,” she continued. “We’re upstairs, in his room, and he goes over to the window. Then he pulls down his pants and starts pissing all over the crowd at the frat next door. Just, like, so casual about it.”

The group laughed. Julia’s eyes were glittering.

“Some of the guys from next door get really mad. They come over, trying to start a fight. They’re threatening to call the cops, all that stuff. We’re downstairs at that point, too. Sebi had passed out in his bed. They keep asking who it was, who did it, no one’s going to tell. But then Sebi strolls up to the front door himself and asks what the problem is. And he’s totally buck naked.”

They laughed louder. “So funny,” the scrawny girl said flatly.

“So the frat guys are backing away, they don’t know what to think, and Sebi offers to walk them home, throws his arms around their shoulders, being all friendly. He was completely blacked out at that point. He tried to pull one of the guys in for a hug, and that’s when they all finally ran away. No one wants to fight a naked dude.”

Julia was grossed out when this happened the previous night, at the party at the hockey house, grimacing at the sight of Sebi’s bare ass. But not anymore. She was beaming, clearly thrilled with the story’s reception.

Later, when we were finally alone, I asked her what that had been about.

“What the hell, Jules? That was embarrassing.”

“Oh, come on. It was hilarious. You’re never going to let Sebi live it down.”

“Yeah, but we’re his friends. These people don’t know him.”

“Relax.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s not a big deal.”

Relax? She wouldn’t even look at me. I felt a smoldering curl of disgust. “What’s with this attitude?” I snapped. I wanted to grab her by the shoulders, shake her until she listened. How did she not get it? “Jules. Why are you being like this?”

“God.” She rolled her eyes again. “Whatever. I’m going to the bathroom.”

She walked away. In those days our fights seemed to come out of nowhere, and with more and more frequency. They were about stupid, meaningless things, but Julia could so easily turn vicious, like an animal baring her teeth. I never knew what to say. I just wanted it to be over. It always seemed easiest to concede before things escalated. I was good at apologizing, even if I didn’t know what I was apologizing for.

I pushed through the living room, which was tight with bodies. The bathroom door was locked. When the door finally opened, some other girl emerged, her expression smeary with drink. She gave me a hazy smile. I went back to the kitchen, then to the backyard, then again to the living room. Julia was nowhere. I pulled out my phone and texted her, then I opened the front door to check the porch. Nothing. I called, but she didn’t pick up. Five minutes passed, then six, seven. Ten minutes. Fifteen. Where was she? Maybe this was some kind of punishment, forcing me to navigate this awful party alone. She probably enjoyed the thought of it.

Then, just as I was about to call again, I saw her coming down the stairs from the second floor. She pushed her way past the crowds. Her cheeks were flushed, her hair messy. She was staring straight ahead. She noticed me and came over, but she was still avoiding my gaze. “Had to use the bathroom upstairs,” she muttered. Then I noticed Adam McCard behind her, bouncing down the stairs two at a time.

She walked several paces ahead of me the whole way home. She wouldn’t even let me come close. As good as an admission of guilt, in my mind. When we got back to the dorm, I was going to tell her that I’d sleep in my own room that night. But outside her door, when Julia turned to face me and looked up at me for what felt like the first time all night, her eyes were brimming with tears. Her lower lip quavered, and she burst into a sob. “I’m sorry,” she gasped. “I’m sorry, Evan. I’m so sorry.”

*  *  *

I checked my cell phone when I got back to my desk that afternoon. Julia had texted, asking me how my day was. It was sweet. I smiled to myself.

We usually ordered dinner from a regular rotation of places in the neighborhood: Italian, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Turkish. Roger always took charge, dictating what everyone was going to order so we could share, and he calculated the tab ahead of time so that we could maximize our thirty-dollar per diem. That night, around seven, he threw a balled-up piece of paper at my head to get my attention.

“Peck,” he said. “Let’s go. We’re going out for dinner.”

“Picking up? Or out out?”

“Out out. It’s deader than a doornail around here. Hurry up,” he drawled, standing. “I made a reservation. A new Indian place on Ninth.”

My stomach rumbled as we walked to the elevator. Roger had that slightly satanic ability to discern your desires with perfect accuracy. Going out for dinner, eating at a table with real tablecloths, hot and spicy food washed down with frosty beer—it was, in fact, exactly what we needed in that moment. And so, by the time we emerged into the last of the day’s sunlight, I was actually in a pretty good mood.

“Evan!” I turned and saw her squinting against the lowering sun. Julia.

“Hey.” I felt the guys staring as I walked over. “What are you doing here?”

She lifted up a plastic bag, a logo I recognized from a deli around the corner. I went there for lunch when I was too impatient for delivery. “I brought dinner. I thought we could eat together. Like the old days, you know.”

“Oh. That’s nice of you, Jules.”

“I got your favorite. Chicken cutlet with bacon and mozzarella.”

Which I’d ordered many times before. The bread was usually stale. The chicken cold and tough. That sandwich was always a last resort. Roger and the others were walking away without me. I just needed a break. The thought of it was unbearable, eating that terrible sandwich, forced to talk about my day, to fake it with Julia. I just wanted to be for one minute. With people who understood. I told her the truth, partially. “The thing is, I was going to get dinner with the guys. We’re going to this new Indian place on Ninth. You understand, right?”

She was quiet, the bag drooping from her wrist. But just because she could saunter out of her job whenever she liked didn’t mean that I could. I was annoyed. I was a little pissed, actually. She could have called ahead. Roger had made a reservation and everything. Her mopey silence was unfair. This didn’t seem like it could be my fault.

After I took the bag from her, promising I’d eat it for lunch the next day, but already planning to let it molder in the refrigerator until I was forced to throw it out, I thought of something. I’d meant to text her earlier.

“Oh,” I called as she walked away. “Guess whose byline I saw today?”

  

“Another round?” the waiter asked. The empty beer glasses were speckled with our greasy fingerprints from the paratha.

“Absolutely,” Roger said. I still had an inch of beer left, which Roger pointed at. “Keep up, Peck.”

We went out together a lot. Dinner, the bar after work almost every night, clubs on the weekends. In better moments, it reminded me of the hockey team. It was something even more comfortable than friendship. I drained my glass and handed it to the waiter.

“Who was that?” one of the other analysts asked me.

“Who was who?”

“That girl you were talking to back there.”

“Oh,” I said. I’d already forgotten. “Right. That was Julia. My girlfriend.”

“What was she doing here?”

Roger laughed, reaching for the last piece of paratha. “You didn’t know?” he said loudly. “Peck is completely whipped. Does whatever his girlfriend tells him to.”

I rolled my eyes. “She was just saying hi.”

“Hey, Roger,” one of the other analysts said. “So what happened to that chick from Saturday night?”

“Which one? Can’t keep track.”

“The blonde. The one from the club.”

“Her? She won’t stop calling.” He gestured at his phone. All of us kept our BlackBerrys faceup on the table, alert to the buzz of incoming e-mails through dinner. He tipped back in his chair. “She was all right. I’m worried she’s gonna be a clinger.”

The waiter delivered our entrées. Roger made another lewd crack about the girl he’d brought home on Saturday night. I ate my lamb curry and let myself dissolve into the banter. Something about that time of year had been making me homesick. Fall had always meant a turnover in routine, a new year of school, the beginning of the hockey season. I missed it, even the miserable parts: muscles that screamed in pain, bruises blackening under pads, sticks slamming into legs. Maybe homesick wasn’t the right word. It was more like a part of me had been put away in a dusty old box, and I missed it. But moments like this were a relief. Another beer, and another. In those moments, I’d forget.

  

At McGuigan’s later that Monday night, I slipped out of our booth while Roger was in the middle of a story, and waited at the bar for Maria to look up.

“Hey,” she said, finally. She smiled. “How long have you been sitting there?”

“Busy night?”

“You have no idea. Hang on a second.” She delivered a brimming tray of bourbons to a waiter, who carried it over to a table. Not our table, but it might as well have been. You could tell they were bankers from a mile away. Almost everyone in there was. Young guys in loosened ties, getting bombed with an end-of-the-world abandon.

“That’ll keep them busy for about five minutes,” she said. “The usual?”

After several weeks of going to McGuigan’s almost every night, I had befriended Maria. She felt like someone I’d known for a long time. In a strange way, even longer than Julia. Like someone from back home. I liked her company, especially when I’d had too much of my coworkers. One night she let me buy her a drink and told me her story. She was putting herself through law school at Fordham with loans and bartending wages. As a girl, she had dreamed of becoming a ballerina, of studying at Juilliard. Her teachers at home all said she had the talent, and she’d moved to the city for it. When I asked what happened, she shrugged. “Flat feet.” She was tall and gorgeous, had thought about modeling, she said, but realized that if her body could let her down once, it could do it twice.

“So why law school?”

“I want to be taken seriously, I guess. I find it interesting. Mostly I don’t want to end up like my mom.” She paused. “I sound like an asshole.”

“Not an asshole. I get it.”

“Well. You’re nice, Evan. You’re not like those other guys, you know?”

Guilt twinged in my chest occasionally during those hours we spent talking, sometimes till the end of her shift. Hours I should have been spending with Julia. I worried Julia could smell the bar on me when I got home, stale beer and smoky whiskey clinging to my shirt before I stuffed it into the laundry pile. I found myself daydreaming about Maria. It reminded me of high school—a girl waiting by your locker after the last bell. Consistent pleasures: the same familiar face, day in and day out.

Maria drew a Guinness for me. “What’s going on tonight?”

“What do you mean?”

“You guys are all worked up. All of you.”

“Oh. It’s the market. This could be the end for a lot of companies.”

“Okay, but you’ll be fine, though.”

“But that’s the thing. Nobody knows. There’s never been anything like this. Nobody knows what could happen to Spire.”

“Well, I don’t mean Spire. I mean you. Say you get fired, go bankrupt, whatever. You aren’t going to have a problem getting a job. I mean, look at you.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Not like that.” She laughed. “I mean you’re smart, you’re polite, you look like a guy anyone could trust. You fit right in. Guys like you don’t stay unemployed for long.”

Someone was waving her down. She rested her hand on mine before she walked away. Maria was good at her job. “Don’t worry too much about it, Evan. You’re just one of those people. It’s all going to work out, you know?”

  

“Evan. Come on in.”

This was the following evening, Tuesday night. It was the first time Michael’s door had been open and unguarded in almost two days.

“Is this an okay time?” Michael was typing fast, glancing over his shoulder at a chart, ignoring the blinking messages on his phone. His office looked like a war zone.

“Fine, fine. I sent Wanda home. What do you have there?”

“The WestCorp models. They’re almost finished, but I need to check an assumption with you before running it.”

“What is it?”

I took a deep breath. “The exports to the Chinese market. I wasn’t sure what tariffs they’re subject to and how much that’s going to affect us. I’ve done some research, and there’s a lot of variation in the taxes on lumber exported to China, so I thought I’d go with a rough average, something like—”

“Zero.”

“Pardon?”

“Your number is zero. The WestCorp exports won’t be subject to any tariffs or taxes. Is that all?”

“Well—yes. Yeah, that’s it.”

“Good.” Michael turned back to his computer. I started toward the door, but I couldn’t help myself. It had been puzzling me for so long. And it still didn’t quite make sense.

“Michael, just want to be sure—no tariffs or taxes at all for these exports, none? It’s just that I’ve seen a lot of—”

He spun in his chair and stared at me, anger flaring in his eyes. “No,” he said sharply. “No tariffs. None. Put that in the model and run it. E-mail me the numbers when you have them. Then go home.”

Back at my desk, as I plugged the last numbers into the model, I felt a hot flush spread under my collar. I shouldn’t have questioned Michael like that. In all my research, I’d never seen a scenario in which the trade barriers had been dropped completely. But he was the boss after all. Maybe I hadn’t looked hard enough.

After the model was finished, I checked everything over slowly. The papers were still warm in my hands when I walked over to Michael’s office, a stupid-big grin stuck to my face. Assuming we took even a conservative position on WestCorp, the money we stood to make was staggering. I had to read it twice, three times to be sure. This kind of good news ought to be delivered in person. When I got there, the door was nearly closed. Michael was on the phone. I almost didn’t recognize him—his voice was strange, different. It quieted. I edged a little closer.

Then Michael spoke again. Another language. It sounded familiar.

Then I remembered: in his usual overly ambitious way, Arthur had decided to take up a new language junior year, even though he already spoke French and Spanish. He stayed up late every night, practicing his tones and inflections. This was the fluent version of those efforts. Michael was speaking Mandarin.

A prickle ran up my spine. Odd. Michael had always asked one of the third-year analysts, a Princeton grad who spoke flawless Mandarin, to translate on conference calls with the Chinese. Michael never spoke on those calls, not once.

It went silent again. I was about to leave the model in the in-box on Wanda’s desk, but I hesitated. I’d e-mail it instead. Better not to have evidence that I’d been hanging around. Overhearing things that I strongly suspected I wasn’t supposed to overhear.

  

The apartment was dark when I got home. It was early for me, just past eleven, but Julia was already asleep.

I sat on the futon and opened my computer. I found myself typing Michael Casey’s name in the search bar. Strangely, it had never occurred to me before, to do this. I didn’t even know what I was looking for. Maybe an explanation for what I’d overheard. The creepy feeling that I couldn’t shake.

I hit Enter.

The top search results were from Spire’s website, Michael’s official company biography. Undergrad at South Dakota, wildcatting for oil in West Texas for a year, MBA completed in 1983. He started at Spire in 1986. Michael never said anything about working anyplace but Spire. I wondered about that three-year window after his MBA.

I kept clicking through the results. A few pages in, there was a link to an archived article in the New York Times. A profile from the business section, dated 1985. There was a grainy photo on the page. I squinted. It was Michael, twenty-odd years earlier.

I scanned through the article. Michael had worked at another hedge fund called Millworth Capital. In the summer of 1985, he made upwards of $400 million for Millworth, shorting foreign currencies. The profile described his unlikely success: a farm boy, the first in his family to go to college, a rising star on Wall Street at age twenty-six. The reporter asked Michael what he thought he could attribute his success to.

Mr. Casey tilts back in his chair, resting his feet on the desk. There are no traces of his former life in his office: no family pictures, no college diploma.

“I don’t think there’s any one way to answer that question,” he says. “You could point to any number of things. But I think there was a moment when I got hooked on this. My first big trade. I cleared $50 million in one day. I was twenty-four years old. I wasn’t going to look back after that.”

“Evan? Evan? Hello?”

Julia was standing in front of me, hair rumpled and eyes scrunched against the glow of the computer screen. I twitched, my hand slamming the laptop shut. “Oh,” I said. “Hi. I didn’t hear you get up.”

“I said, what are you doing? Work?”

“Uh, just some e-mails. I’m done now.”

She padded over to the kitchen sink, her bare legs sticking out from beneath her T-shirt. She took a glass from the cabinet, turned on the tap, held her finger in the stream of water, waiting for it to get cold. Mundane gestures I’d seen a hundred times before, but at that moment, they felt too private for me to witness. Part of a separate life. I wanted something from Julia that it felt impossible to ask for. A silence different from the one that had grown between us.

“I’m coming to bed,” I said. She waved a hand to show that she’d heard before disappearing into the darkness of the bedroom.