The day after the last holiday party, time moved unevenly in the Gradia Building.
For Oskar, the hours of the day crashed into one another so rapidly that he felt himself in constant motion, vertiginous at his desk. To stay or flee? There might still be time to leave the country, but every passing hour cemented his position. The coffee wasn’t working as well as Oskar had hoped, and later, the day came back to him in disconnected flashes. In the early afternoon he passed by Harvey’s office and saw him scribbling something on a legal pad. Oskar saw a solid thicket of handwriting, no space between lines.
“What are you writing there?”
“Oh,” Harvey said, glancing at the writing as if he’d only just noticed it. This old thing? “Nothing much.” He went back to writing, and Oskar went to use the photocopier, but he found Joelle there by the machine, standing perfectly still, staring at nothing. Oskar turned away silently and went to use the photocopier on the eighteenth floor. Eighteen was bustling, as always. It was a brighter world up there. They would be fine, wouldn’t they, all of the people up here? If the brokerage company were legitimate, which had always been his general understanding, he saw no reason why they wouldn’t be. If he were a better person, he thought, he’d be happy for them instead of resentful. The scale of the Arrangement took Oskar’s breath away when he thought of it. He’d always secretly loved the intrigue of Seventeen, the feeling of being in an inner circle, of operating outside of the edges of society, perhaps even outside of the edges of reality itself—was there any difference, actually, in the grand universal scheme of things, between a trade that had actually occurred and a trade that appeared to have occurred on Oskar’s impeccably formatted account statements?—but up here on this higher level were people who worked in utter innocence, people whose idea of a transgression was charging dinner with friends to the corporate Amex, and he felt such longing to be one of them.
When he passed by Alkaitis’s office, the door was open, but Alkaitis wasn’t there. Two men in dark suits were looking at something on his desk, their coats thrown carelessly over the back of one of the visitors’ chairs. One of the men was on his cell phone, speaking too quietly for Oskar to hear. Simone sat at her desk outside his office door, watching them.
“Who are these guys?” Oskar asked.
She beckoned him close. “Alkaitis was arrested this morning,” she whispered. He smelled the cool mint gum on her breath.
He gripped the edge of her desk. “For what?” he made himself ask.
“They said securities fraud. Did you know,” she said, “he had me shredding documents?”
“What kind of…?” Oskar was having trouble breathing, but she seemed not to have noticed.
“Account statements,” she said. “Memos. Letters. It makes sense now that the cops are here. Hold on,” she said. Her phone was ringing. “Jonathan Alkaitis’s office.” She listened, frowning. “No, of course not, I had no idea.” She drew in her breath sharply and held the phone away from her face. A new call was coming in, then another, the lines lighting up. “He called me a cunt and then hung up,” she said to Oskar, and took the next call, which freed up the first phone line, which immediately began to ring. “Jonathan Alkaitis’s office,” she said, and then, “I know as much as you do. We—I literally just found out. I know. I—” She flinched, and placed the phone softly in the cradle. All six lines were lit up now, a cacophony of overlapping ringtones.
“Don’t answer any more,” Oskar said. “You don’t deserve this.”
“I guess it must be all over the news.” Simone reached behind the phone and pulled out the cord, and they looked at one another in the silence.
“I have to go,” Oskar said. He returned to Seventeen for only long enough to grab his jacket. He was too agitated to stand and wait for the elevator so he opted for the stairs. He was moving quickly, not quite running but a little faster than a walk, and he almost tripped over Joelle, who was sitting on the twelfth-floor landing with her legs extended before her. Joelle’s eyes were closed.
“Are you dead?” Oskar asked.
“Maybe.” Joelle’s voice was leaden.
“Are you okay?”
“Is that a serious question?”
“What I’m asking is did you just sit down for a minute,” Oskar said, “or are you having a heart attack or something.”
“I don’t think I’m having a heart attack.”
“If I leave you here and keep walking, are you going to throw yourself off a bridge?”
“He’s been arrested,” Joelle said.
“Yeah.”
“My husband’s going to see it, if he hasn’t already, and then he’ll say to me, ‘Oh my god, can you believe it?’ and I’ll either have to lie to his face, which isn’t going to be plausible because he isn’t actually a moron, or I’ll have to say ‘Well yes, honey, actually I can.’ ”
Oskar was silent.
“You ever think about why we were chosen?” Joelle asked. “For the seventeenth floor?” She still hadn’t opened her eyes. It occurred to Oskar that perhaps the FBI had already gotten to her, that maybe she was recording this conversation. What wouldn’t a mother with a young family do to avoid prison?
“I mean, here’s the question,” Joelle said, “and I’d be genuinely interested to hear your thoughts: How did he know we’d do it? Would anyone do something like this, given enough money, or is there something special about us? Did he look at me one day and just think, That woman seems conveniently lacking in a moral center, that person seems well suited to participate in a—”
“I should go,” Oskar said. “I’m actually not feeling that well.” He stepped over Joelle’s legs and fled, jogging down flight after flight. There’s something a little nightmarish about tower stairwells, the repetitive downward spiral of doors and landings. When he emerged from a side door into the lobby, Oskar found himself in the midst of a small crowd, at least two dozen people trying to talk their way in. Something twisted in his stomach. These were Alkaitis’s investors. Several of them were openly weeping. Others were arguing with security guards, who had formed a small crowd of their own and looked confused and distressed.
“Look,” a guard was explaining, “I sympathize, but we can’t just let anyone—”
“You.” A woman had caught sight of Oskar. “What company do you work for?”
“Cantor Fitzgerald,” Oskar said. It was just the first company that came to mind.
“I didn’t know Cantor Fitzgerald had offices here,” someone said, but Oskar was already out on the sidewalk, where a separate crowd was assembling: news vans were parking on the curb and blocking traffic, men carried TV cameras with shockingly brilliant lights, journalists were moving in on everyone exiting the building.
“Did you work with Jonathan Alkaitis?” someone asked.
“Who?” Oskar said. “God no, of course not.”
Oskar walked by Olivia Collins as he left, but because she’d never been to the seventeenth floor—Alkaitis conducted his meetings on Eighteen—she didn’t recognize him. She was standing in the lobby with the other investors, trying to make sense of the altered world. She’d been here for some time, and the scene—the weeping investors, the camera people, the news vans pulling up outside—had the quality of a bad dream.
A few hours earlier, she’d been awakened from a nap by a ringing phone. “I’m sorry, Monica,” she said, after a moment of confusion, “I was sleeping just now, and I’m not sure I quite…” She went quiet, frowning, trying to understand what her sister was saying. “Monica,” she said, “are you crying?” She’d been sitting on the edge of the bed, looking at her beloved tiny apartment, this place that she rented mostly with the proceeds of her investment with Alkaitis, but what Monica seemed to be telling her was that there had never been any investments at all, and in some fundamental way the situation didn’t compute. Olivia stood slowly—rising too quickly made her dizzy sometimes—and fumbled around in the mess of the closet for her waterproof boots, the handbag that she always meant to hang on a hook but never did, her winter coat. “Monica,” she’d said, interrupting her sister midsentence, “I’m going to go down to his office and see if I can find anything out. I’ll call you later.”
In the taxi, she applied bright lipstick and tied a silk scarf over her hair for added fortitude. She’d hoped to get into Jonathan’s offices, to talk to someone—anyone—but she was far from the first to have this idea. A crowd was gathering in the lobby of the Gradia Building. “It’s my life savings,” a man was shouting to one of the security guards, “you have to let me at least talk to someone, this is my entire life—” but the guards, four of them, were arrayed along the turnstiles and seemingly had no intention of letting anyone through. Olivia stood by the doors, unsettled by the crowd’s fury.
“Do you not understand?” A man was speaking to a guard who seemed to Olivia to be very young, although in fairness most people looked young to her these days. “All of my money has been stolen.”
“I understand, sir, but—”
“You have to calm down,” a guard was saying to a woman who was talking very close to his face.
“I will not calm down,” the woman said, “I will not be told to be calm.”
“Ma’am, I sympathize, but—”
“But what? But what?”
“What am I supposed to do, ma’am? Let a crowd of angry people storm the eighteenth floor?” The guard was sweating. “I’m just doing my job. I am doing my job. Step away from me, please.”
Olivia stepped forward as the other woman retreated. “I’m a personal friend of Mr. Alkaitis’s,” she said.
“Then call up there and get someone to come down and get you,” the guard said.
She called Alkaitis’s number, again and again, but no one picked up. The cowardice of it. She pictured them hiding up there behind locked doors, listening to ringing phones, doing nothing. She knew no one else’s extension. She stayed in the lobby for a long time, milling around with the others, falling in and out of conversations, and at first there was some solace in being with people who’d also been robbed, who were also in shock, but after a while the miasma of sadness and fury was too much to bear, so she hailed a taxi—the last taxi she’d take for a while, she realized, watching the numbers tick up on the meter—and went back to her little apartment uptown.
After the pandemonium in the lobby of the Gradia Building, her home was very quiet and still. Olivia closed the door behind her and stood for a moment in the silence. She set her keys on the kitchen table and sat for a while, drinking a glass of water and trying to adjust to the world at hand. After a concentrated search, she found her most recent bank statement and studied it carefully. Until today, she’d had two sources of income: Alkaitis’s investment fund and Social Security. If she was very careful, she decided, looking at the numbers, she could afford to stay in her home for two more months.
Darkness had fallen in New York, but it was still only three in the afternoon in Las Vegas, where Leon Prevant, the shipping executive who had once had the colossal misfortune of meeting Alkaitis at the bar of the Hotel Caiette, was trapped in a meeting that had outlived its natural lifespan but refused to die. His phone vibrated in his pocket. “Forgive me,” Leon said to the other attendees, “this is urgent,” even though it probably wasn’t. He realized his mistake as he left the room. Leon had been coming to this conference for fifteen years and his lanyard still carried the company name, but he was here as a consultant, and his current contract ended next month. His boss had been told to put a freeze on consulting contracts, “until the landscape looks a little brighter,” but when would that be? He had been laid off two years ago in the wake of a merger, and now, in late 2008, ships were moving across oceans at half capacity or less and could be chartered for a third of last year’s cost. The landscape—the seascape—was clouded and dim. In other words, it wasn’t an optimal moment to run out of meetings, even zombie meetings that should have ended twenty minutes ago. It was his accountant calling. Whatever she was calling about, surely it could wait, so he let the call go to voicemail, counted slowly to five, and reentered the room with an apology for leaving.
“Everything all right?” His boss, D’Ambrosio, was still frowning at the report that Leon had given him.
“Perfectly, thank you. If you’ve all had a chance to digest the numbers—” He’d been hoping everyone would take a quick look at the numbers and agree to discuss them later, but the meeting was apparently immortal.
“We have, unfortunately,” D’Ambrosio said. “Bit of a bloodbath, isn’t it?”
“Well. As you can see, we’re facing a significant overcapacity problem.”
“Understatement of the goddamn century,” someone said.
“Obviously, we’re not alone. I had an interesting conversation this morning with a friend over at CMA. They’ve got ships at anchor off the coast of Malaysia.”
“Just sitting there?” Miranda had been Leon’s junior colleague in Toronto and then in the New York office, in the years before he’d been restructured into consultant status. Now she had Leon’s former title, office, and telephone extension, though not his former salary.
“For the moment, yes. Just waiting it out.”
“It’s an interesting idea,” D’Ambrosio said. “By ‘interesting,’ I mean ‘possibly the best of several bad options.’ ”
“We’d be creating this weird kind of ghost fleet.” This was Daniel Park, who’d worked alongside Leon in the Toronto office and was now director of operations for Asia. “Are we sure we don’t want to just scrap a few of our older vessels?”
“That strikes me as a permanent solution to a temporary problem,” Miranda said.
“But this downturn,” Park said, “this chaos, whatever you want to call it—”
“ ‘This period of sustained uncertainty,’ ” one of the Europeans interjected in ironic tones, quoting the morning’s keynote speaker. He was German and relatively new. Leon couldn’t remember his name.
“Right, yes, whatever euphemism we’re going with here, this thing could last years. Are we prepared to commit to potentially several years of staffing a fleet of unused ships off the coast of Malaysia?”
“The staffing would be light,” Leon said. “Skeleton crew, just enough men on board to keep it afloat.”
“If we do it, maybe we set a time limit,” the German said. Wilhelm, Leon remembered now, his name was Wilhelm, but what was the surname? It was troubling that he didn’t know. He’d known everyone in senior management once. “Maybe we put the ships out to anchor now, then commit to revisiting the question in a year, two years, and if we still don’t need them, we scrap the excess.”
“Seems like a reasonable course of action to me,” D’Ambrosio said. “Thoughts, objections?”
“There’s the question of the new Panamax vessels,” Miranda said. There was a collective sigh. The company had commissioned two new ships back in the lost paradise of 2005, when the demand had seemed endless and they were struggling to keep up, and the ships—under contract, paid for, two and a half years into the building process, and now extravagantly unnecessary—would be delivered from the South Korean shipyards in six months.
“I say we send them straight to the ghost fleet.” D’Ambrosio glanced at his watch. “Gentlemen, Miranda, I’m afraid we’re out of time. Let’s pick this up tomorrow. Wilhelm, if you could get us an analysis…”
The meeting finally unwound, the room breaking into small groups or rushing away to get to a conference session that had already started. Leon walked out alongside Daniel. “Are you going to the economic outlook panel?” Daniel asked.
“Skipping it, I think. I’ve been up to my neck in economic outlooks for the past four months.”
“Haven’t we all.” The corridor was several degrees colder than the conference room, the wintry chill of Las Vegas air-conditioning. Two young hotel employees were clearing dirty mugs from the coffee and pastry stations. “I’m going to go call my wife,” Daniel said. “Catch up with you at dinner?”
“Looking forward to it.”
It was a pleasure to be away from other people for a moment, with no one making obvious proclamations about economic collapse or pulling him into hysterical conversations about the chartering horizon. Leon poured himself a hazelnut coffee and stepped out into the atrium.
Miranda had left the meeting ahead of him and was sitting some distance away on an industrial sofa, writing something in her legal pad. No, not writing, sketching: the pad was angled away from him, but he watched the movements of her wrist with some interest as he approached. She’d started out at the company as his administrative assistant, which all these years later seemed like a faintly unbelievable rumor. He cleared his throat, and she flipped a page over as she set the pad on the marble coffee table, so that he couldn’t see whatever she’d been working on. He’d seen her perform this motion a hundred times, at least, and as always, he made a point of not asking. Leon held strong opinions about privacy.
“You’re skipping the economic outlook session too,” she said.
“This entire conference is an economic outlook session. I decided coffee was more important.”
“I like your priorities. That’s an interesting idea, by the way, parking ships off the coast of Malaysia.”
“Do you mind if we talk about literally anything other than the economic downturn?” he asked.
“Not at all. I’m thinking about making an excuse and leaving early tomorrow.”
“What, you’re not enjoying the atmosphere of barely suppressed panic?”
“There’s something almost tedious about disaster,” Miranda said. “Don’t you find? I mean, at first it’s all dramatic, ‘Oh my god, the economy’s collapsing, there was a run on my bank so my bank ceased to exist over the weekend and got swallowed up by JPMorgan Chase,’ but then that keeps happening, it just keeps collapsing, week after week, and at a certain point…”
“I know what you mean,” Leon said. “It’s the surprise that bothers me, personally, the way everyone I talk to seems shocked by the downturn in the industry.”
“Yeah, so, true story, one of our colleagues pulled me aside today, I’m not naming names, and he said, ‘I just can’t believe what’s happening to our industry, can you?’ And I’m trying to be patient with these people, I really am, but I had to ask him, which part is surprising to you? Let’s break this down. What is it you can’t believe, exactly? That people don’t want to buy goods when the economy collapses, or that people don’t want to ship goods that nobody’s buying?”
“Predictable outcomes, and all that.” Leon remembered at that moment that his accountant had called earlier and absently checked his phone. She’d called again, ten minutes ago. “Sorry,” he said, “I think I have to call this person.”
“If you don’t see me at dinner, it means I successfully escaped.”
“I’ll be silently cheering you on from the sidelines,” he said as he rose, and wandered away from her, toward the glass atrium wall, toward the phone call that would split his life neatly into a before and an after.
“I’m going to assume you haven’t heard the news,” his accountant said, “or you would’ve called me already.”
“What news? What’s going on?”
“You didn’t hear?”
“Obviously not.” He’d never liked her. Bit of a robot, he remembered Miranda telling him when he’d asked if she could recommend a good accountant, but the best I’ve ever worked with. She sees all the angles. Although what was the point of hiring the best accountant you’ve ever worked with if you’re going to ignore her advice and park all your retirement savings in a single investment fund?
“Leon”—and she didn’t sound like a robot at all, she sounded human and deeply shaken; she was conveying information, he realized just before she told him, that she very much didn’t want to convey—“Alkaitis was arrested this morning.”
“What?” He sank gracelessly into the nearest sofa, staring at an embankment on the other side of the glass, red gravel dotted with cacti under a garishly blue sky. “I’m sorry, did you say—what?”
“It’s all over the news,” she said. “He was a con man. The whole thing was a fraud.”
“The whole…what?”
“It was a con,” the accountant said.
“What do you mean? All the money I invested, you’re saying…?”
“Leon,” she said, “I’m so sorry, but your money wasn’t invested.”
“That isn’t possible. The returns have been excellent, we’ve been living off of them, we—”
“Leon.”
“I don’t understand,” he said. “I just don’t understand what you’re telling me.”
“What I’m telling you is that Alkaitis was running a Ponzi scheme,” she said. “The money you gave him, he didn’t invest it. He stole it. Your account statements were fictional.”
“What does this mean?” he asked, but he knew what it meant.
“Your money’s gone,” she said softly.
“All of it?”
“Leon, it wasn’t real. None of it was real. Those returns…” She didn’t add that I told you seemed almost too good to be true, because she didn’t have to. They both remembered the conversation. How could he have been so stupid? He was staring at the sky, inexplicably out of breath. He didn’t remember hanging up on the accountant, but he must have, because now he was no longer speaking with her, now he was reading a news story on his phone about the arrest of Jonathan Alkaitis at his home in Greenwich that morning, about a Ponzi scheme’s collapsing when one too many investors pulled out, more arrests expected, the SEC and FBI investigating, and somewhere in that morass was Leon’s retirement savings, or rather the ghost of his retirement savings, the savings themselves having been spirited away.
“This isn’t a disaster,” he whispered to himself. Time had skipped again; he was no longer looking at his phone; he was standing by the wall of glass. The economic outlook panel had apparently just broken up, his colleagues spilling out into the corridor and mobbing the coffee stations, a rising tide of overlapping voices. He had to get out. He crossed the plains of gray carpet and floated down the escalator, through the lower atrium and past the casino, out into the thin air of the winter desert. The sidewalk was crowded and the tourists walked in slow motion. Why was a shipping conference being held in a desert city? Because Las Vegas hotel rooms are cheap. Because the desert is a sea. It isn’t a disaster, he told himself, we will not be destitute. He could say he was robbed and that wouldn’t be inaccurate, but on the other hand, these were the facts of the case: he’d met Alkaitis at a hotel bar, Alkaitis had explained the investment strategy, Leon hadn’t understood, and he’d given Alkaitis his retirement savings anyway. He didn’t insist on a detailed explanation. One of our signature flaws as a species: we will risk almost anything to avoid looking stupid. The strategy had seemed to adhere to a certain logic, even if the precise mechanics—puts, calls, options, holds, conversions—swam just outside of his grasp. “Look,” Alkaitis had said, at his warmest and most accommodating, “I could break it all down for you, but I think you understand the gist of it, and at the end of the day, the returns speak for themselves.” It was true, Leon could see it for himself, a steadiness in that column of numbers that appealed to his deepest longing for order in the universe.
A pair of showgirls walked by, eighteen or nineteen years old in matching outfits, holding heavy headdresses of plumed feathers in their hands, their faces set hard with exhaustion and makeup. Not real showgirls, just girls who collected tips for posing with tourists on the sidewalk. He kept passing middle-aged men and women in red T-shirts that read GIRLS TO YOUR ROOM IN 20 MINUTES, handing out flyers that presumably said the same. The people passing out flyers had thousand-yard stares and were worn down in a manner suggestive of a difficult life, or was Leon imagining this? He didn’t think he was imagining it. He stepped into a hotel lobby, he hardly noticed which one, just to get off the sidewalk. He was thinking about the girls: if they could be in your room in twenty minutes, then probably they were already here somewhere, on the Strip, waiting. Picture the hotel suite where the girls are waiting, the air thick with cigarette smoke and perfume, girls staring at their phones, doing lines in the bathroom, talking about whatever it is that twenty-minute girls discuss, waiting, counting hours, counting money, hoping the next date isn’t a psychopath. The vision made him profoundly sad. He could live without retirement savings. No one in this country actually starves to death. It’s just one future slipping away and being replaced by another. He had his health. They could sell the house. He found a padded bench away from other people, near the entrance to the hotel casino, and called his wife.
“I saw the news,” she said before Leon could say hello. The fear in her voice was unbearable. “How bad is it, L?”
“It’s a disaster, Marie.” He realized that he was crying, for the first time in well over a decade. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart, I am just so sorry, it’s an absolute disaster.”
Ella Kaspersky was on CNN that night. Olivia and Leon were both watching, Olivia at her sister’s apartment in New York and Leon in a hotel room in Las Vegas. “Well, of course it occurred to me that the returns could be legitimate, Mark,” she said to the interviewer, “but it’s just that that would make it the first legitimate fund in history whose returns could be graphed on a nearly perfect forty-five-degree angle, so you’ll understand my skepticism.”
Oskar and Joelle were watching too, at a bar in Midtown. They’d comforted themselves over the years by telling themselves that Kaspersky was a marginal figure, but on the other hand, of course she’d always been perfectly correct about the nature of Alkaitis’s asset management unit, and Oskar had read her furious and disconcertingly accurate blog posts.
“There’s no pleasure in having been right,” she said now, elegant and impeccable in a CNN studio. She was telling her story—approached by Alkaitis in a hotel lobby; did her research and concluded that the returns were impossible; contacted the SEC, who bungled the investigation to such an egregious degree that there was talk now of congressional inquiries; tried for years to get the story out and was written off as a crank—and even though Oskar knew all of this to be correct and knew Kaspersky was in the right, he still wanted to throw his shoe at the screen. Why are the righteous so often irritating?
“She couldn’t be happier,” Joelle said. “She loves that she was right.”
In the morning, the investors were back at the Gradia Building. Harvey, who had turned off his phone and spoken to no one, was surprised that people were already in position at seven-thirty, a dozen of them in an anguished knot on the far side of the sidewalk, where they’d apparently been banished by building security. He tried to waft by without making eye contact, but a woman reached out and touched his arm.
“Harvey.”
“Olivia.” He’d met Olivia a few times over the years, in Alkaitis’s office. She wore a white coat and yellow scarf, and in the unrelenting gray of Manhattan in December, she looked like a daffodil.
“You work with him, right?” Another investor was interrupting his vision, a red-faced man with terror in his eyes. “With Alkaitis?”
Harvey stared at Olivia, who stared at Harvey. He wished he could be alone with her, so that he could confess everything without these extraneous people crowding in.
“Harvey,” she said, “is it true? Did you know?”
Another investor had joined them, no, two more, the scene becoming angrier and more crowded, Olivia radiant in her white coat and the others in their New York winter monochromes, black and gray, standing too close with their fear and their coffee breath. Harvey was afraid for his life. They would be entirely justified, he felt, in picking him up and throwing him in front of a passing car. They looked like they wanted to. He was a big man, but they could do it, six of them together. The street was right there.
“I have to go upstairs and see what’s going on,” he said.
“Oh, you’re not going anywhere,” one of them said, “not until you tell us—”
But the last thing they’d expected was for him to bolt like a startled horse, so no one was able to catch him before he darted away. When had he last run? It had been years. He hadn’t realized how fast he could be. He was already across the lobby. He swiped his card and got through the turnstiles while they stood dumbfounded on the sidewalk, staring. He was in terrible shape, though, so now he couldn’t breathe. He’d done something to his ankle—no, both ankles. In prison, Harvey decided, he was going to be one of those men who work out all the time, push-ups in his cell, weights and jogging in the yard. When he arrived on Seventeen, he found that the door to the office suite had been propped open. A police officer was standing by the door. The people in the suite registered, at first, as a mass of undifferentiated shadow: dark suits, dark jackets with FBI or ENFORCEMENT on the back.
There are moments in life that require some courage. Harvey didn’t turn around and walk back to the elevators and take a cab to JFK and leave the country, although at that point he still had possession of his passport. Instead, he walked into the heart of the swarm and introduced himself.
Harvey’s office was populated this morning by agents of both the FBI and the SEC, several of whom were very interested in speaking with him, why don’t you just take a minute to gather yourself and we’ll all take a seat in the conference room.
“I just need to get something out of my desk,” Harvey said.
They offered to get it for him, possibly fearing a hitherto-unnoticed handgun.
“If you look in the top left drawer,” Harvey said, “under the files, you’ll find a legal pad with my handwriting on it. Several pages of writing. I think it’ll be of interest to you.” He floated ahead of them to the conference room.
Oskar passed him on the way in. “What is all this?” he asked, white around the mouth.
“You know what this is,” Harvey said. Oskar looked like he wanted to be sick, but the odd thing was, Harvey didn’t actually feel that bad. None of this felt real to him. Oskar texted Joelle, so she didn’t come in at all. She drove to her kids’ school and signed them out midmorning, took them to F. A. O. Schwarz and told them they could have anything, smiling all the while, but the youngest burst into tears because if they could have anything then obviously something was drastically wrong. Later the children remembered this as a long, uneasy day of trooping around Manhattan in the cold, in and out of toy stores and hot chocolate dispensaries and the Children’s Museum while their mother kept saying “Isn’t this fun?” but also kept tearing up, alternately lavishing them with attention and disappearing into her phone.
“We’ll remember this day always, don’t you think?” she said in the car on their way home to Scarsdale. They were moving very slowly in the late-afternoon traffic. “Yes,” her children said, but later their memories were destabilized by Joelle’s letters from prison: how much fun we had that last day, she wrote, that toy store, that giant stuffed giraffe, those cups of hot chocolate, I am so glad we had that day together, do you remember that wonderful display in the museum, and they wondered if they were misremembering, because what they mostly remembered was the cold, their wet feet, the feeling of wrongness, the gray of Manhattan in the winter rain, the way the giraffe dragged in a puddle on the way back to the car.
By the time Joelle’s children acquired the giraffe, Ron had already left. He slipped out at noon to meet with a lawyer, who advised him not to come back. Harvey was still being interviewed in the conference room. Oskar was playing Solitaire on his computer, which had been backed up and disconnected from both the Internet and the internal network, while investigators went through his filing cabinets. Enrico was at his aunt’s house in Mexico City. He’d spent some hours digging through drawers in search of his dead cousin’s old passport, and now that he had it he was sitting with her on the patio, the two of them smoking cigarette after cigarette in silence, Enrico glancing at his phone from time to time, following the news of Alkaitis’s arrest, reflecting on how strange it was that he’d never felt less free in his life.
Oskar was the last to leave that night. He’d spent the day acting as confused as possible, directing investigators to the locations of various files while asking what this was all about, trying to convey the illusion of helpfulness without actually giving anything away. It had been an exhausting performance. The elevator doors opened to reveal Simone, on her way down from Eighteen with a file box in her arms.
“Crazy day,” Oskar said as he stepped in beside her.
She nodded.
“What’s in the box?”
“A few personal effects from Claire Alkaitis’s desk. She asked me to get them for her.”
He saw a crystal figurine, a framed photo of Claire and her family, a few books. The kids in the photo looked young, no older than six or seven. Oskar looked away. In the ghost version of his life, the parallel-universe version in which he’d gone to the FBI eleven or twelve years ago, those children were spared all of this; in that life, Claire Alkaitis would have been in her teens when her father was arrested, obviously terribly traumatic but not the same thing as being implicated, not at all like being a VP in one of her father’s companies and having her name dragged through the press; in that ghost life, he realized, Claire Alkaitis and her children were probably fine.
“Do you want to grab a quick drink or something?” he asked Simone.
“No,” Simone said.
“Are you sure?”
“You’re pretty much the last person I’d want to get a drink with.”
“Okay, got it. You could just say no.”
“I did.” The doors opened on the lobby and she walked away. The crowd of investors had dwindled to six or seven on the sidewalk, no longer weeping but still in shock, staring at the Gradia Building, staring at everyone coming out. Simone walked by without looking at them and disappeared into a black SUV that idled at the curb.
Claire Alkaitis was where Simone had left her, in the backseat. “Thank you,” she said, “I appreciate this.” Her voice was barely above a whisper. She took the box from Simone, studied the photograph—an artifact of a civilization that had recently ended—and looked at the books as if she’d never seen them before. She lowered the window slightly, in order to push the crystal figurine through the crack. It made a pleasant tinkling sound as it shattered on the pavement. “Gift from my father,” she said. The driver carefully avoided making eye contact with her in the rearview mirror. “Where do you live, Simone?”
“East Williamsburg.”
“Okay. Aaron, can you take us to East Williamsburg?”
“Sure, you got an address for me?”
Simone gave it to him. “Don’t you have to get home?” she asked Claire, who had closed her eyes again.
“Home’s actually the last place I want to be, just at the moment.”
An interlude of quiet, then, while the car moved south toward the Williamsburg Bridge. Outside, it was beginning to snow. Simone had been in New York City for six months by now, and she thought that she was starting to understand how a person could become very tired here. She’d seen them on the subway, the tired people, the people who’d worked too long and too hard, caught up in the machine, eyes closed on the evening trains. Simone had always thought of them as citizens of a separate city, but the gap between their city and hers was beginning to close.
“How many people knew about it?” Simone asked eventually. They were passing through the East Village.
“I assume everyone in the asset management unit. Everyone who worked on the seventeenth floor.” Claire didn’t open her eyes. Simone was beginning to wonder if Claire was sedated.
“All of them? Oskar, Enrico, Harvey…?”
“It turns out that’s literally all they were doing on that floor, running a fraudulent scheme.”
“Did anyone else know? Up on Eighteen?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so. The companies were always kept completely separate. Everything’s still so unclear.” The car was rattling over the Williamsburg Bridge, and now the snow was falling in a frenzied way that Simone found hypnotic. “You’re so lucky,” Claire said.
“I don’t feel lucky.”
“You know what you are?”
“Unemployed?”
“That’s a temporary condition. You know what’s permanent? You’re a person with a really excellent cocktail story. Ten, twenty years from now, at a cocktail party, you’ll be holding a martini in a circle of people, and you’ll be like, ‘Did I ever tell you about the time I worked for Jonathan Alkaitis?’ ” Claire’s voice cracked when she spoke her father’s name. “You get to walk away untarnished.”
Simone didn’t know what to say.
“One seventy Graham Avenue,” the driver said.
“Okay,” Simone said, “this is me. Are you going to be all right?”
“No,” Claire said dreamily.
Simone glanced at the driver, who shrugged.
“Okay, well, thanks for the ride.” She left Claire in the SUV and let herself in through the iron gate, then the front door, into the shadowy and never-cleaned foyer. The light over the stairs buzzed unpleasantly. Her roommate Yasmin was in the kitchen, eating ramen noodles and reading something on her laptop.
“How’d it go?” Yasmin asked.
“I just took the most awkward car ride ever with Claire Alkaitis.”
“She’s the wife?”
“Daughter.”
“What was she like?”
“Like she’d taken three Ambien,” Simone said. “Also kind of hostile. She was like, ‘You get to walk out of this with a story for cocktail parties. In twenty years, you’ll be telling this story to people over martinis.’ ”
“Yeah, but she’s right,” Yasmin said. “I mean objectively. Twenty years from now, you’ll literally be telling the story at cocktail parties.”
Oskar walked out of the Gradia Building and into the beginning of the snowstorm, the first light flakes drifting down. He didn’t notice the detectives until they were almost upon him, a block from the office. There were two of them, a man and a woman, flashing their badges as they got out of an unmarked car that had pulled to a smooth stop in front of a fire hydrant.
“Oskar Novak?”
In a parallel version of events he might have run, and in his ghost life, his honorable life, his non-Ponzi life, he was never here at all. But in this world Oskar stopped in his tracks, and standing there on the sidewalk in the first snow of that winter, seconds away from his first pair of handcuffs, he was surprised to realize that what he felt was relief.
“FBI,” the woman said. “I’m Detective Davis, and this is Detective Ihara.” In a distant way he realized that they’d been merciful; they must have been tracking him since he walked out of the Gradia Building, but they’d waited until he was out of sight of the investors and the reporters gathered outside.
“You’re under arrest,” Detective Ihara said calmly. The few people passing on the sidewalk eyed him surreptitiously or openly stared, but all of them gave him a wide berth. The detectives were reciting their lines—You have the right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law, you have the right to an attorney—and Oskar stood still, accepted the handcuffs without protest, snow falling on his face, while here and there, in the city and in the suburbs, the rest of us were being arrested too.
At the sentencing hearing six months later, Alkaitis’s lawyer appealed to the judge on compassionate grounds. “If we are to be honest with ourselves,” the lawyer said, “who among us has never made a mistake?” But this was an error, Olivia saw that immediately. The judge was giving the lawyer an incredulous look, because sure, yes, everyone makes mistakes, but those mistakes are typically more on the order of forgetting to pay a phone bill, or leaving the oven on for a couple hours after dinner, or entering the wrong number into a spreadsheet. Perpetuating a multibillion-dollar fraud over a period of decades is something entirely different.
Could the lawyer see the error too? Impossible to tell. Veer Sethi was a sleek, expensively dressed person with silvery hair and a sense of performance. The man sitting next to Olivia—a fellow investor, a retired dentist who all but quivered with rage when he talked about the fraud—had told her that Alkaitis’s lawyer was one of the most expensive criminal defense attorneys in the city, but Sethi didn’t strike Olivia as a particularly formidable person. He’d made a mistake but he pressed on with the story, like a boy following a dwindling trail into the woods at nightfall: Once upon a time there was a family, Jonathan and Suzanne and then a daughter, Claire. (Speaking of which, where was Claire? Olivia had attended three hearings without seeing her.) They lived in a small house in an unfashionable suburb, then a slightly larger house, Jonathan working long hours and Suzanne working a little too, brief and inexpensive summer vacations in places that could be reached by car, Christmases with her family in Virginia or with his family in Westchester County, the inevitable struggles of starting a business, the business’s ever-increasing success, Claire goes to Columbia and then takes a job in her father’s brokerage company—the legitimate company, Sethi wished to stress to the courtroom, the company that had absolutely nothing to do with the crime—and then Suzanne is diagnosed with an aggressive cancer.
“I don’t suggest that anything in this excuses my client’s actions,” the lawyer said. “But I’ve been married to my wife for thirty-five years, and as a husband, I can only imagine what those days must have been like for that family.” Vincent had shown up, which Olivia thought must have required a certain courage. She was a few rows up and on the other side of the courtroom, sitting very still in a gray suit.
“And while no measure of grief can excuse his actions, it was during that period,” the lawyer continued, “that the fraud began.” He seemed to be trying to convey the impression that the Ponzi was something that happened, the way weather happens, as opposed to a premeditated crime coldly perpetuated and covered up with the assistance of a dedicated staff. (If only the staff were here! Olivia would have liked to personally kill them. She would start with Harvey Alexander. He would beg. She would be merciless.) The judge was writing something. Sethi was going on about hospitals and surgeries and rounds of chemotherapy, Alkaitis’s vanishing from the office for weeks at a time, distracted and not paying as much attention as he should have been. He’d been heavily invested in several dot-com companies and had been caught flat-footed when they imploded. There’d been signs that the tech bubble was ending, but he’d been distracted by his wife’s illness and death, and he hadn’t read the signals correctly.
“And this was the moment,” the lawyer said, “when my client made his fatal mistake.” How many times could he drop the word mistake into a single address? Was his strategy as transparent to the judge as it was to Olivia? She couldn’t tell. The judge was impassive. “My client took a loss, and he thought, You know what, I can cover this. He made a terrible, terrible error in judgment, a terrible mistake. He decided to cover his losses with income from new investors. He was embarrassed. He thought he could make up for the shortfall over a month or two, and no one would know. Why would he do such a thing? Why would he make a mistake like that?” Here, a pause for dramatic effect. Veer Sethi had been handed an impossible task. He was performing to the best of his abilities.
“What I believe, Your Honor, is that it comes down to a question of fear. Every life contains a measure of terrifying moments. My client had lost his wife. He was desolate. All he had left was his work, his job. And the fraud started, this terrible mistake of his, because he could not bear to lose his work, which at that moment was the last thing he had.” Which wasn’t particularly flattering to Claire, Olivia thought. Perhaps she should have followed her sister Monica to law school. She felt she could do a better job than this guy was doing. The courtroom was too warm. Olivia let herself drift for just a moment, back to a particular afternoon in the studio in Soho, sitting on the sofa with Renata during one of those violent August rainstorms, taking a break from painting, listening to the rain, drinking wine, Renata saying, “I couldn’t join the working world even if I wanted to,” but in a way that sounded like she was trying to convince herself, which Olivia suspected was why the moment had stayed with her. Renata had made it to 1972 before she succumbed to her habit. 1973? No, definitely ’72, because Olivia remembered watching reports of Watergate and wondering what Renata would have thought about it, if Renata were still alive, Renata who’d left her politician father and secretly alcoholic mother in the Maryland suburbs to come here, Renata who claimed not to care at all about that world but who carefully followed politics all her life.
Back in the courtroom, Veer Sethi was still talking. “When you look at my client,” he said, “you are not looking at an evil man. You are looking at a deeply flawed man, a man who, at the moment when it mattered, at the moment when he realized that he had losses he couldn’t cover, did not find his courage. You are looking at a decent man who made a mistake.”
It was impossible not to notice, as Sethi thanked the judge for his consideration and resumed his seat at the table, that the lawyers for the state were smirking and shaking their heads. Alkaitis was making careful notes in a legal pad. Sethi and his two junior sidekick lawyers were conferring and shuffling papers in order to avoid looking at anyone, especially not at the state. The state was rising from the prosecution table, the state was buttoning its suit jacket, the state was beginning, with barely disguised contempt, to rip holes in the timeline that the defense had laid out. It was curious, the state noted, that the Ponzi scheme was supposed to have begun around the time of the dot-com crash, when one of Alkaitis’s employees—a Harvey Alexander—had confessed to participating in a scheme that had begun in the late seventies. Olivia’s mind wandered. She hadn’t been sleeping well. She’d given up her apartment and moved in with Monica, and the bed in Monica’s guest room was uncomfortable. Was there any point, actually, in staying to listen to more of this?
But Olivia stayed till the end. The sentence, when it came, was like something from a fairy tale: there once was a man locked away in a castle for one hundred and seventy years.
The intake of breath in the courtroom was audible. A hundred and seventy years, someone repeated nearby. A soft whistle. Some muted cheers. Olivia sat very still and felt absolutely nothing.
She’d set out before dawn with a sense of embarking on a mission, but after the verdict came down, she almost wished she’d stayed home. She couldn’t have hoped for a longer sentence, and yet there was a curious sense of anticlimax. She was slow leaving the courthouse and went unnoticed when she finally straggled out. She didn’t mind her cloak of invisibility, in this instance. She wasn’t feeling very well. There’d been a time when a New York City heat wave wouldn’t have bothered her, but that time had passed. The media were clustered around other investors. “Look, it’s just, it changes nothing,” she heard the dentist say. He was right, she supposed. Jonathan was going to prison forever, but Olivia still lived in her sister’s guest bedroom. She made her way uptown through the furnace of the subway system and observed the way the life of the city continued around her, indifferent and uninterrupted. When she’d boarded the downtown train that morning she’d had the thought that she was witnessing history, but would history remember Jonathan Alkaitis? Just another empty suit in a time of collapse and dissipation, architect of an embarrassingly unsophisticated scheme that had run for a while and then imploded. The heat was too much. The subway was crowded. When she finally emerged into the Upper East Side, a few blocks from her sister’s apartment, she had to walk very slowly so as not to faint. A man walking in the opposite direction almost walked into her; he frowned as he stepped out of the way at the last minute, as if she were entirely at fault.
“This is academic,” the judge had said, “but I’m required for technical reasons to impose a period of supervised release following your sentence.” Idea for a ghost story: there once was a man who remained under supervised release for three years following the end of his 170-year prison term. Idea for a ghost story: there once was a woman who drifted unseen through the city of New York until she faded into the crowds and the heat.