5

New York City

Havens cracks open the lobby door and peeks out. He always takes the stairwell in the Chelsea because it is filled with art, some modern masterpieces given to the proprietors in exchange for rent. But this time he took it because of Laslow. His hastily packed leather duffel is slung over his shoulder. He pats his front pocket to ensure that Weiss’s flash drive is still there. He takes in the scene: the eclectic shapes and colors of the art, the full-time residents chatting, he imagines, about politics, art, coffee. Must be nice, he thinks.

Then he sees him.

Across the lobby, standing with his broad back to him, staring at Larry Rivers’s Dutch Masters, to the left of the hotel’s glass front doors, is the man with the shaved head who murdered Danny Weiss last night. Laslow. He’s sure of it.

He steps back, eases the door closed, and continues downstairs to the basement. He wonders, How did he find me? Then he remembers the malware alert, the screen flashing off and on, and he concludes they must have tracked his IP address right back to the hotel’s servers. The fire door opens on a laundry room filled with carts of soiled linens. A middle-aged Asian woman in front of a bank of washing machines stares at him with horrified eyes. If someone wanted to harm her down in this din, there’s nothing she can do.

“Exit?” he asks, smiling, but the woman only stiffens and glares as he barrels past.

Coming into the light of an alley on the west side of the building, he pulls up his hood and lowers his head as he approaches the sidewalk of 23rd Street.

Zigzagging south and west with his head down, he wonders why Rick Salvado, a self-made multibillionaire, would want to kill anyone. He thinks of the Rick Salvado he’d heard of before he came to The Rising, the Rick Salvado who hired him, as compared to the man who is bent on killing him.

The Salvado he’d heard of was a fiercely independent investor, orphaned at a young age, who worked his way up from a commodities gopher to gigs at Merrill, Bear Stearns, Oppenheimer—before going out on his own. His first company, the now infamous Allegheny Fund, briefly made him a star and then, all at once, a villain, a government scapegoat for alleged trading improprieties during the NASDAQ dot-com bust and market collapse of 2001–02. His meltdown was public and the case against him was bitter and contentious. Somehow, amazingly, he didn’t go to prison, but his fund went under and his reputation was seemingly destroyed.

All of which made his comeback all the more unlikely and remarkable. After paying his fines and eventually expressing his regrets, Salvado dedicated himself to helping to promote ethical and responsible trading practices. Plus, it didn’t hurt that he still had a knack for making money and for self-promotion. Havens can still remember watching him on the business channels in his dark suit with the omnipresent American flag pin, dispensing wisdom, recommending winners, and cautioning against losers and market traps with the gusto of a vaudevillian, the passion of a televangelist.

Soon, instead of reading “Rick Salvado: Former Fund Manager” the title under his onscreen image began to read, “Rick Salvado: CEO, The Rising.” Not long after that Havens got the call while sitting in his windowless back office at Citi. What he remembers is that the initial call wasn’t from a recruiter, or a human resources pro at The Rising.

The voice on the other end that day said, “Drew Havens, Rick Salvado at The Rising here. I’ve heard a helluva lot about you. How’d you like to get rich together?”

At 20th Street he climbs the stairs onto the High Line trail and walks south. At the 14th Street passage he stops in a semi-enclosed industrial space to listen to his latest favorite piece of art, a sound installation called A Bell for Every Minute. Every sixty seconds he hears the sound of a different bell recorded somewhere in New York City. School bells, church bells, and the New York Stock Exchange bell. It soothes him, listening not so much to sounds, but to the memories of other people and other times. As he looks westward across the roof of an abandoned meat packing plant, toward the Hudson and Jersey, the recently salvaged Coney Island Dreamland bell chimes a deep and haunting tone. He takes out his phone and pulls a scrap of paper from his pocket.

A different ringing now, a different tone. A call halfway around the world to a place he’s never been, for a woman he’s never met and who may very well already be dead.

“Rosehall, how may I help you?”

“Yes,” he says. “Sawa Luhabe, please.”