There’s a morning in FCI Florence Medium 1 when Alkaitis steps out into the yard and sees a flash of color in the crowd. It’s red, but that’s impossible. Red isn’t allowed here. Not just red, but a red power suit, of the kind he hasn’t seen on a woman since the early nineties, mid-nineties at the latest, fire-engine red with extremely padded shoulders. The woman wearing it seems to move too quickly; in a few steps she has somehow crossed the yard and is standing near him, staring.
“Madame Bertolli,” he says quietly, trying to steady his voice.
“You say something?” a nearby guy asks.
“No, nothing.” Yvette Bertolli obviously isn’t here, because that would be impossible and no one else seems to have noticed her. Nonetheless, here she is. She begins a slow circle of the yard, sometimes flickering slightly. She looks much younger than she was the last time he saw her. This may actually be the same suit she was wearing when he met her for the first time, which would’ve been, what, 1986, ’87? A lunch in Paris. She’d just started her own investment advisory business and she had a few high-net-worth French and Italian clients for him. On the morning of Alkaitis’s arrest, her clients had a combined total of $320 million of their money in the Ponzi. Yvette Bertolli died of a heart attack that afternoon.
Now she circles the yard, glancing every so often at Alkaitis. He closes his eyes, pinches himself, every trick he can think of, but she’s still there when he goes inside an hour later, conferring with Faisal under a tree.
“I’d like to ask about your employees,” the journalist Julie Freeman says on one of her visits.
“They were good people,” he says. “Loyal.”
“It’s interesting that you think of them as good people, when they were involved in the crime.”
“No, I did all of that on my own.” He has decided to stick with this story until the end of his life, even though three of his five asset management staffers have been convicted. He detects a flicker of irritation as she makes a note.
“I assume you heard that Lenny Xavier lost his appeal,” she says. “Guilty on nine counts, all involving the Ponzi.”
“I’d prefer not to talk about him,” Alkaitis says.
“Let’s switch tracks, then. I’d like to ask you about something one of your staffers said on the stand,” she says. “When Oskar Novak was cross-examined, he was asked about the search history on his computer, and he said, and I quote, ‘It’s possible to both know and not know something.’ ”
“Why, what was his search history?” Alkaitis hasn’t actually spent much time thinking about Oskar or any of the others. He carried them for years. They could’ve quit at any time.
“He spent a combined total of nine and a half hours researching residency requirements for countries that don’t have extradition treaties with the United States,” Freeman says.
“Ouch. Poor kid.” In his mind, Oskar is still the nineteen-year-old college dropout in a too-big suit at his job interview. “That can’t have gone well for him.”
“It didn’t.” She waits a beat or two, but he doesn’t ask. The truth is, he doesn’t really care what happened to Oskar, which prison he ended up at or the length of his sentence. “Anyway,” she says, “I was curious about whether that idea has any relevance for you, that notion that a person can know and not know something at the same time.”
“It’s an interesting idea, Julie. I’ll think about it.”
There’s something in it, he decides later, standing in line for dinner. It’s possible to know you’re a criminal, a liar, a man of weak moral character, and yet not know it, in the sense of feeling that your punishment is somehow undeserved, that despite the cold facts you’re deserving of warmth and some kind of special treatment. You can know that you’re guilty of an enormous crime, that you stole an immense amount of money from multiple people and that this caused destitution for some of them and suicide for others, you can know all of this and yet still somehow feel you’ve been wronged when your judgment arrives.
Between Freeman’s visits, Alkaitis finds himself dwelling on Oskar’s search history. It’s kind of poignant, actually, thinking of the kid running Internet searches on countries without extradition treaties, research for a project he lacks the guts to carry out. Not like Enrico, who remains at large.
He’s in line for the commissary when he sees Olivia. She’s wandering around, touching various items on the shelves, not looking at him. She’s wearing a blue dress that he remembers from that last summer before he went to prison; she wore this dress on the yacht. He backs away and leaves without buying anything, deeply shaken. He goes back to his cell and lies down with an arm over his eyes. Hazelton is somewhere else, thank god. He’s desperate to be alone, but the problem is that now he can no longer be sure of whether he’s alone in any given room. Certain borders are dissolving.
“Can I ask you to look someone up for me?” he asks Julie Freeman on her next visit. Two days have passed since he saw Olivia in the commissary. “One of the investors was an old friend of mine, a painter who’d also known my brother. Her name was Olivia Collins. I wondered if you could just do a search and see what became of her.”
When he sees Freeman again, two weeks later, he knows what she’s going to say before she says it. “I have some bad news,” she tells him when she sits down. “That woman you asked me to look up, Olivia Collins. She died last month.”
“Oh,” he says. But he already knew this, he realizes. He’s seen Olivia twice now, once in the commissary and once in the yard, where she was engaged in conversation with Yvette Bertolli.
“I’m sorry,” Freeman says, and launches into her questions.
“Can I ask you something?” he asks a little later, interrupting a line of tedious questioning about account statements.
“Go ahead.”
“Why do you want to write about all this?”
“I’ve always had an interest in mass delusion,” she says. “My senior thesis was about a cult in Texas.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“Well, look at it this way. I believe we’re in agreement that it should have been obvious to any sophisticated investor that you were running a fraudulent scheme.”
“I’ve always maintained that,” Alkaitis says.
“So in order for your scheme to succeed for as long as it did, a great many people had to believe in a story that didn’t actually make sense. But everyone was making money, so no one cared, except Ella Kaspersky.”
“People believe in all kinds of things,” he said. “Just because it’s a delusion doesn’t mean it can’t make real money for people. You want to talk about mass delusions, I know a lot of guys who got rich off of subprime mortgages.”
“Is it fair to call you the embodiment of the era, do you think?”
“That seems a little harsh, Julie. I didn’t cause a global economic meltdown. I was as much a victim of the economic collapse as anyone. By the time Lehman Brothers folded, I knew I couldn’t keep it going much longer.”
“I’d like to ask you about Ella Kaspersky,” Freeman says.
“Not my favorite person in the world.”
“Do you remember your first meeting with her?”
He met Kaspersky in 1999, at the Hotel Caiette. The trip was ill-starred from the beginning. Suzanne was sick by then and had stayed home in New York, and by the time he arrived at the hotel he was already regretting going out there and thinking about cutting the trip short. But he needed investors, so he’d been spending a week of every month away from New York City, trawling club drawing rooms and hotel bars. He liked the Hotel Caiette in particular, because the fact that he owned the property lent instant credibility: Look, here we are having a conversation under a roof that I own. Not that he played any role whatsoever in the management of the place, but that wasn’t important.
On that visit to the Hotel Caiette he came downstairs on his second evening and there was Ella Kaspersky, an elegant woman in early middle age, drinking whiskey in an armchair and gazing out at the twilight luminescence of the inlet, the reflection of the lobby rising to the surface of the glass. Alkaitis positioned himself nearby, nodded when she glanced at him. What did they talk about? Italy, if he remembers correctly. She was an art collector. She didn’t work. She traveled, she studied languages, she went to auctions and art fairs. She’d just spent three months studying Italian in Rome, and so they went off together on an extended tangent about the pleasures of Italy before the conversation turned to what he did for a living. She was interested. It emerged quite naturally that she had money to invest; her father, who’d died only a few months earlier, had bequeathed most of his fortune to their family’s charitable foundation, and Ella was involved in the foundation’s investment decisions.
“Tell me about your investment strategy,” she said.
He went into it in some detail. He told her he was using the split-strike conversion strategy, which involved buying a collection of stocks along with option contracts to sell those stocks at a set price later, thus minimizing risk. He timed these purchases according to fluctuations in the market, he told her, sometimes pulling out of the market altogether to invest his clients’ money in government-backed securities, U.S. Treasury bills and such, reentering the market when the time seemed right. She gave the impression of listening intently, but she was at least three drinks in by then and he wouldn’t have guessed that she’d retained everything he’d said, until a letter arrived at his New York office a few weeks later. She’d done some research on his trading strategy and methods. She’d analyzed the performance of a fund that he managed. She’d spoken with two experts on the investment strategy he claimed to be using, neither of whom could explain to her how Alkaitis’s returns were so high and so smooth; she was aware of two mutual funds who employed the same strategy, but their returns were much more volatile than his. She was puzzled by his ability to trade stocks in such quantities without affecting the stock prices. His returns would seem to require an almost psychic knowledge of when the market was going to fall. “I don’t wish to imply,” she wrote, “that I’m entirely closed to the possibility of mystery in the universe, or that I’m unprepared to accept the existence of unusual talent, even outright genius, when it comes to predicting the movement of markets, and yet one can’t help but note that your trading strategy, as practiced at the scale at which you seem to practice it, would require more OEX put options than actually exist on the Chicago Board Options Exchange.” On a personal note, perhaps he could understand her horror when she made inquiries and discovered that her family’s private foundation—which, she wasn’t sure if she’d mentioned this in Caiette, had been founded for the purpose of funding research into colon cancer, which had killed her mother a decade ago—was already heavily invested in Alkaitis’s fund. “Naturally,” she wrote, “I took the matter to the foundation’s director, who shared my alarm and immediately sent you a withdrawal request. Thus disaster was averted, but it is personally appalling to me to consider how close my family’s foundation came to being wiped out. How terrible to think of my parents’ legacy having been so imperiled.” She’d taken the liberty of forwarding a copy of her letter to the SEC.
Alkaitis called Enrico into his office. It was interesting to observe Enrico as he read Kaspersky’s letter; his face didn’t change, but his hands shook a little. He sighed as he handed it back.
“She can’t prove any of this,” Enrico said. “It’s innuendo and speculation.”
“She sent this to the SEC. They could walk in at any minute.”
“We’ll jump off that bridge when we come to it, boss.” Something that occurs to Alkaitis only much later, a few years into his new life at FCI Florence Medium 1: Why didn’t Enrico leave then? In the winter of 1999, with Ella Kaspersky’s having figured it out?
In any event, in the version of history that he gives to Julie Freeman in the prison interview, he shows Kaspersky’s letter to no one.
“So what happened next?” Freeman asks.
“We got a letter from the SEC. They were opening an investigation.”
“Why didn’t they catch you?”
“I don’t know, to be honest. They were incompetent or they didn’t care, or both. I assumed they’d catch us. All it would’ve taken was a phone call. Literally one phone call, and they could’ve confirmed there were no trades taking place.”
“And by ‘us,’ you mean you and your staff.”
“What?”
“ ‘I assumed they’d catch us,’ you said.”
“I misspoke. I meant me.”
“I see. Must have been something of a pleasant shock, when they closed the investigation without catching you.”
“Very much so.”
“Did you see her again?”
“Kaspersky? No.”
Yes, but it isn’t an evening he likes to think about. He and Suzanne were eating dinner at Le Veau d’Or, a restaurant they both loved. Well, he was eating dinner, at any rate. Suzanne was sipping chicken broth. They’d just been to see the oncologist and it was as though they’d entered a tunnel that ended in darkness. They were being transported at high speed toward night. Alkaitis was trying to keep up his end of the conversation but Suzanne was in a different tunnel, an even darker one, she was answering in monosyllables and he could already see how they would be divided from now on, how Suzanne would be carried more and more rapidly away from him. He’d thought the evening couldn’t possibly get any worse, but any given evening can always get worse. A few tables away he heard breaking glass, and when he turned to look, he saw Ella Kaspersky. She was dining alone. A busboy had dropped her wineglass and it had shattered on a bread plate.
“You know her?” Suzanne asked, seeing something in his expression.
“You’re not going to believe this, but that’s Ella Kaspersky.”
(A difference between life with Suzanne and life with Vincent, one of many: he told Suzanne everything.)
“I didn’t think she’d be elegant.” Kaspersky didn’t glance in their direction. She was engaged in dabbing white wine from her lapel. “All this time, I was picturing her as some kind of disheveled crank.”
“Are you going to eat any more?” He wanted his wife to eat something, to keep her strength up, and also very much wanted her to stop staring at Kaspersky.
“No, let’s get the check.”
He got the check and attended to the details while his wife studied Kaspersky, who’d waved off the busboy’s apologies and had returned to reading some kind of document, an inch of paper held together with a binder clip. He didn’t like the way Suzanne was looking at her.
“Let’s just leave,” he said softly, when the check was taken care of, but Kaspersky was seated at the restaurant’s narrowest point, and they had to walk quite close to her table to get to the door. As they neared the table, Suzanne’s face was set in a terrifying smile. Kaspersky finally looked up when they were almost upon her. She had an excellent poker face, except that her eyes narrowed slightly when she recognized him.
“Good evening, Ella,” Alkaitis said. The SEC had closed the investigation earlier that week. There was no need to be ungenerous in victory.
She leaned back in her chair, considering him, and sipped her wine. She didn’t speak for so long that he thought she wasn’t going to say anything, and was just gathering himself to leave when she said, “You’re beneath my contempt.”
Alkaitis was paralyzed. He couldn’t imagine what to say.
“Oh, Ella,” Suzanne said. A small shard from the broken wineglass had been overlooked at the base of the bread basket. Suzanne plucked it between two fingers and dropped it delicately into Kaspersky’s water glass. They all watched it drift to the bottom.
Suzanne leaned in close and spoke quietly. “Why don’t you swallow broken glass?”
There was a moment where no one spoke.
“I’m sure you must hear this all the time,” Ella Kaspersky said, “but you two are perfect for each other.”
Alkaitis took his wife’s arm and steered her rapidly out of the restaurant, out to the cold street, where the car was waiting. He bundled her in and sat beside her. “Home, please,” he said to the driver. He glanced over and saw that Suzanne was weeping silently, her hands over her face. He pulled her close and held her tightly, her tears falling on his coat, and they stayed like that, not speaking, all the way back to Connecticut.
In a different life, in the library at FCI Medium 1, the visiting professor takes an uncharacteristic break from F. Scott Fitzgerald. “I want to talk about allegory today,” he says. “Any of you know the story of the swan in the frozen pond?”
“Yeah, I think I know that story,” Jeffries says. He was a police officer until he tried to arrange a hit on his wife. “The one about the swan who doesn’t fly away in time, right?”
Alkaitis finds himself thinking about the swan story later on, standing in line for his potatoes and mystery meat. The story was a favorite of his mother’s, repeated every so often throughout childhood and adolescence. There’s a flock of swans on a lake in the deepening autumn. As the nights grow colder, they all fly away. Except one, for reasons Alkaitis can’t remember: a lone swan who doesn’t perceive the approaching danger or loves the lake too much to leave even though it’s clearly time to go or is afflicted by hubris—the swan’s motivations were hazy and, Alkaitis suspects, changeable, depending on what message his mother was trying to impart at any given moment—and then winter sets in and the swan is frozen in ice, because it didn’t get out of the water in time.
“I thought I’d be able to get out,” he tells Freeman when she comes to see him again. “I was embarrassed. I didn’t want to let everyone down. They were just so greedy, these people, the returns they expected…”
“You feel the investors pushed you to commit fraud,” she says blandly.
“Well, I didn’t say that, exactly. I take full responsibility for my crimes.”
“But you seem to think the investors were partly to blame.”
“They expected a certain level of returns. I felt compelled to deliver. It was a nightmare, actually.”
“For you, you mean?”
“Yes, of course. Imagine the stress,” he says, “the constant pressure, always knowing that eventually it would all come crashing down but trying to keep it going anyway. I actually wish I’d been caught sooner. I wish they’d caught me back in 1999, that first SEC investigation.”
“And you maintain that no one else knew about the scheme.” Freeman’s voice was carefully neutral. “The account statements, the deception, the wire transfers, that was all you.”
“It was all me,” he says. “I never told a living soul.”
On a different day, Yvette Bertolli circles the recreation yard, walking a little behind and to the right of an elderly mafioso whose name used to inspire terror on the Lower East Side but who now shuffles awkwardly in a slow-motion attempt at jogging. Elsewhere, Olivia and Faisal are speaking with a man Alkaitis doesn’t recognize, a man who is also not a prisoner, presumably also not alive, a middle-aged man in a beautiful gray wool suit.
There were four Ponzi-related suicides that Alkaitis is aware of, four men who lost more than they could bear. Faisal was one of them; is this man another? There was an Australian businessman, if Alkaitis remembers correctly, also a Belgian. Are more ghosts even now approaching FCI Florence Medium 1? He stares at Olivia and is overcome by rage. What right does she have to haunt him? What right do any of them have to haunt him? It isn’t his fault that Faisal chose to do what he did. If he’s to be honest with himself, he supposes Yvette Bertolli’s heart attack was probably Ponzi related, but she should have seen the scheme for what it was and she could’ve gotten out whenever she wanted, just like everyone else, and whatever happened to Olivia can’t possibly be blamed on him, he’s been in prison for years now and she’s only been dead for a month. When Alkaitis thinks about how much money he provided, all the checks he sent out over the years, he feels a hollow rage.
“I’m not saying what I did was right but by any rational analysis I did some good in the world,” he writes to Julie Freeman. “By which I mean I made a lot of money over a period of decades for a lot of people, a lot of charities, many sovereign wealth funds and pension funds, etc., and I know that might seem self-justifying but the numbers are the numbers and if you look at investments vs. returns, most of those people/entities took out far more than they put in and made far more money than if they’d just invested in the stock market and therefore I would suggest that it is inaccurate to refer to them as ‘victims.’ ”
“Well,” he said to Suzanne, in the hospice, “at least now you won’t have to go to prison when the scheme collapses.”
“Think of the savings in legal fees,” she said. They were like that in the last few months, all competitive bluster and stupid bravado, until she stopped talking, after which he stopped talking too and just sat silently by the bed, hour upon hour, holding her hand.
When it did finally collapse, when he was finally trapped, the wrong woman was there with him. Although Vincent impressed him, at the end, despite not being Suzanne. The tableau: His office in Midtown, the last time he was ever in that room. He was sitting behind his desk, Claire crying on the sofa, Harvey staring into space, while Vincent fidgeted around with a coat and shopping bag and then sat and stared at him until he finally had to tell her: “Vincent,” he said, “do you know what a Ponzi scheme is?”
“Yes,” Vincent said.
Claire, from the sofa, still crying: “How do you know what a Ponzi scheme is, Vincent? Did he tell you? Did you know about this? I swear to god, if you knew about this, if he told you…”
“Of course he didn’t tell me,” Vincent said. “I know what a Ponzi scheme is because I’m not a fucking idiot.”
He thought, That’s my girl.
In the counterlife, he walks through a hotel corridor—wide and silent with modernist sconces, the corridor of the hotel on Palm Jumeirah—and takes the stairs this time, walking slowly through the cool air. There’s a potted palm on every landing. The lobby is empty except for Vincent. She’s standing by a fountain, looking into the water. She looks up when he approaches; she’s been waiting for him. It’s different this time, he’s certain that this cannot possibly be a memory, because it takes him a moment to recognize her. She’s much older, and she’s wearing strange clothing, a gray T-shirt and gray uniform trousers and a chef’s apron. There’s a handkerchief tied over her hair, but he can tell that her hair’s very short, not at all like it was when they were together, and she’s not wearing makeup. She’s become a completely different person since he saw her last.
“Hello, Jonathan.” Her voice seems to come from a long way off, like she’s speaking by telephone from a submarine.
“Vincent? I didn’t recognize you.”
She gazes at him and says nothing.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
“Just visiting.”
“Visiting from where?”
But she’s looking past him, distracted now, and when he turns he sees Yvette and Faisal, strolling by one of the lobby windows. Yvette’s laughing at something Faisal just said.
“They’re not supposed to be here,” he says, truly alarmed, “I’ve never seen them here before,” but when he looks back, Vincent’s gone.
Later, lying awake in his uncomfortable bed in the noncounterlife, the nonlife, he’s struck by the unfairness of it. If he has to see ghosts, why not his real wife, his first companion instead of his second—his co-conspirator, his beloved Suzanne—or why can’t he see Lucas? He isn’t well. He’s in the counterlife more often than he’s in the prison now, and he knows that reality is sliding away from him. He’s afraid of forgetting his own name, and if he forgets himself, of course by then he’ll have forgotten his brother too. This thought is vastly upsetting, so he marks a tiny L on his left hand with Churchwell’s pen. Every time he sees the L, he decides, he’ll make a conscious effort to think of Lucas, and in this way thinking of Lucas will become a habit. He heard somewhere that habits are the last to go.
“A habit, like brushing your teeth,” Churchwell says.
“Yes, exactly.”
“See, but here’s the difference. Every time you brush your teeth, your teeth aren’t progressively degraded.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m no expert, but I remember reading somewhere, every time you retrieve a memory, that act of retrieval, it corrupts the memory a little bit. Maybe changes it a little.”
“Well,” Alkaitis says, “I suppose I’ll have to take my chances.” He’s troubled by this new information—is it new information? There’s a ring of the familiar about it—because these days he mostly only returns to one memory of Lucas, the same memory retrieved again and again, and it’s terrible to think that he’s chipping away at it every time, that it might even now be mutating in as-yet-imperceptible ways. When he isn’t in the counterlife he likes to dwell in a green field in his hometown, in the twilight following a family picnic. This was Lucas’s last summer. Jonathan was fourteen. Lucas arrived in the midafternoon, four trains later than planned. Jonathan remembers waiting at the station for one train, then another, then a third and a fourth, Lucas finally stepping out into the sunlight, much thinner than Jonathan remembered, a wraith in dark glasses. “Sorry about that,” he said, “I guess I just somehow lost track of time this morning.”
“We were almost starting to worry!” their mother said with that nervous little laugh that Jonathan had only recently begun to notice. She’d spent the last hour crying in the car while their father paced and smoked cigarettes. “We thought you maybe weren’t coming.” The family picnic was her idea, of course.
“Wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” Lucas said, and their father’s jaw tightened. As always, Jonathan couldn’t tell if Lucas was being sincere or not. It wasn’t fair that Jonathan had to be so much younger. He’d never been able to keep up.
“How’s the painting going?” he asked when they were in the backseat of the car together, and decades later in FCI Florence Medium 1 he can still feel the pleasure of that moment, of having thought to ask such an adult question.
“It’s going great, buddy, thanks for asking. Really great.”
“You’re still enjoying the city?” Mom always said the city in the way a preacher might say Gomorrah.
“I love it.” Lucas’s tone was a little off, though, even fourteen-year-old Jonathan could perceive that. Their parents exchanged glances.
“If you ever wanted to come home for a bit,” their father said. “Take a little break from it all, even just a week or two, get a little fresh air…”
“Fresh air’s overrated.”
Later, considering the memory from afar, from FCI Florence Medium 1, Alkaitis doesn’t remember much about the picnic. What he remembers is afterward: a sense of calm at the end of the long strange day, a temporary peace, sitting there in the shade with his whole family together, and then an hour or so when the sun is setting and their parents are starting to talk about driving Lucas back to the train station (“unless you’d like to stay here tonight, honey, you know there’s always room…”), one last beautiful hour of throwing a Frisbee with his brother in the deepening twilight, running and diving over grass, the pale disk spinning through the dark.