Limitless

8

ALTHOUGH THINGS BEGAN to get a little blurry later on, looking back now – from my wicker armchair in the Northview Motor Lodge – I can remember the next day, which was a Thursday, and the two days after it, as just that… days – distinct entities of time that had beginnings and endings… you got up and then x number of hours later you went to bed. I took a dose of MDT-48 on each of these mornings, and my experience of it was pretty much the same as it had been during the first session, which is to say that I came up on it almost immediately, remained in my apartment the whole time and worked productively – very productively – until its effects wore off.

On the first day, I fielded a couple of invitations to go out with friends, and actually cancelled something I’d had on for the Friday evening. I finished the introduction – a total of 11,000 words – and planned out the remainder of the book, in particular the approach I was going to take with the captions. Naturally, I couldn’t write these until I had a clear idea of which illustrations I’d be using, so I decided to get the laborious process of selecting the illustrations out of the way as well. This took me several hours to do. It should have taken me about four to six weeks, of course, but at the time I thought it best not to dwell on such matters. I gathered the relevant material – cuttings, magazine spreads, album covers, boxes of slides, contact sheets – and arranged it all on the floor in the middle of the room. I started sifting through it and made a sustained series of confident, resolute decisions. Before long I had a provisional list of illustrations and was in a position to start writing the captions.

But when I’d got that done, it suddenly occurred to me – and I didn’t envisage it taking more than another day – wouldn’t I then have the whole book done? A complete draft, and in only something like two days? OK, but I’d been thinking about it for months, gathering the material, turning it over in my mind. I’d devised a scheme for it – of sorts. I’d done a certain amount of research. I’d thought of the title.

Hadn’t I?

Maybe. But there was no getting around the fact that for an endomorphic slug like me – central to whose belief system was the notion that a severe lack of discipline was somehow a thing to be cherished – accomplishing this much in two days was extraordinary.

But why fight it?

On the Friday morning I continued writing the captions and by about lunchtime I could see that I was indeed going to get them finished that day, so I decided to phone Mark Sutton at Kerr & Dexter to tell him what stage I was at. The first thing he wanted to know about was the telecommunications manual I was supposed to be copywriting.

‘How’s it coming along?’

‘It’s almost done,’ I lied. ‘You’ll have it on Monday morning.’

Which he would.

‘Great. So what’s on your mind, Eddie?’

I explained about the status of Turning On, and asked him if he wanted me to send it over.

‘Well-’

‘It’s in good shape. Possibly needs a little editing in parts, not much, but-’

‘Eddie, the deadline on that’s not for another three months.’

‘I know, I know, but I was thinking that if there are any other titles in the series up for grabs, maybe I could do… another one?’

‘Up for grabs? Eddie, they’ve all been assigned, you know that. Your one, Dean’s, Clare Dormer’s. What is this?’

He was right. A friend of mine, Dean Bennett, was doing Venus, a most-beautiful-women-of-the-century thing, and Clare Dormer, a psychiatrist who’d written a few popular magazine articles about celebrity-associated disorders, was doing Screen Kids, about the way children were portrayed on classic TV sit-coms. There were three others in the pipeline, as well. Great Buildings, I think, was one.

I couldn’t recall the others.

‘I don’t know. What about phase two?’ I asked him. ‘If these things do well-’

‘No plans for phase two yet, Eddie.’

‘But if these do well?’

I heard a quiet sigh of exasperation at this point. He said, ‘I suppose there could be a phase two.’ There was a pause, and then a polite, ‘Any suggestions?’

I hadn’t actually thought about it, but I was anxious to have another project on hand, so cradling the receiver on my shoulder I cast an eye over the bookshelves in my living-room and started reeling off some ideas. ‘How about, let me see…’ I was staring at the spine of a large grey volume on a shelf above the stereo now, something Melissa’d given me after a visit to a photography thing at MoMA, and a fight. ‘How about one on great news photos? You could start with that amazing shot of Halley’s Comet. From 1910. Or the Bruno Hauptmann picture – remember… at the execution? Or the train crash in Kansas in 1928?’ I had a sudden flash of the mangled railway carriages, the dark billowing clouds of smoke and dust. ‘Also… what else?… there’s Adolf Hitler sitting with Hindenburg and Hermann Goering at the Tannenberg Monument.’ Another flash, this time of a distracted Hermann Goering holding something in his hands, gazing down at it, something that looks curiously like a laptop computer. ‘And then you’ve got… stick bombs over Paris. The D-Day landings. The kitchen debate in Moscow, with Khrushchev and Nixon. The napalm kid in Vietnam. The Ayatollah’s funeral.’ Still staring directly at the book’s spine, I could literally see these images now, and vividly, one after the other, scrolling down as they would on a microfiche. I shook my head and said, ‘There must be thousands of others.’ I looked away from the bookshelves and paused. ‘Or, I don’t know, you could do anything, you could do movie posters, advertisements, twentieth-century gadgets like the can opener or the calculator or the camcorder. You could do automobiles.’

As I threw out these suggestions – reaching over to the desk at the same time to steady myself – I also became aware of a second tier of ideas forming in my mind. Up until that point I’d only ever been concerned about my own book. I hadn’t thought about the series as a whole, but it struck me now that Kerr & Dexter were really being quite slapdash about it. Their twentieth-century series was probably only a response to a similar project that was being done by a rival publishing house – something they’d gotten wind of and didn’t want to be trounced on. But it was as if once they’d decided to do it, they felt that was it – they’d done the work. To survive in the marketplace, to keep up with the conglomerates – as Artie Meltzer, K & D’s corporate vice-president, was always saying – the company needed to expand, but off-loading a project like this on to Mark’s division was just paying lip-service to the idea. Mark didn’t have the resources, but Artie knew he’d take it anyway, because Mark Sutton, who was incapable of ever saying no, took everything. Then Artie could forget about it until the time came to apportion blame after the series had flopped.

What Artie was missing out on here, however, was the fact that the series was actually a good idea. OK, others would be doing similar stuff, but that was always going to be the case. The thing was to do it first, and better. The material – the iconography of the twentieth century – was there, after all, ready-made and waiting to be window-dressed, but as far as I could see Sutton had only managed to put together half a package, at best. His ideas lacked any focus or structure.

‘Then you’ve got, I don’t know, great sporting moments. Babe Ruth. Tiger Woods. Fuck, the space programme. There’s no end to it.’

‘Hhmm.’

‘And shouldn’t all of these books have similar titles?’ I went on. ‘Something identifiable – mine for instance is Turning On: From Haight-Ashbury to Silicon Valley, so Dean’s could be, instead of just Venus, it could be… Shooting Venus: From… Pickford to Paltrow, or From Garbo to Spencer, something along those lines. Clare’s, if she confined it to boys, could be… Raising Sons: From Beaver to Bart. I don’t know. Give it a formula, make it easier to sell.’

There was a silence on the other end of the line, and then, ‘What do you want me to say, Eddie? It’s Friday afternoon. I’ve got deadlines today.’

I could picture Mark in his office now, lean and geeky, struggling to stay on top of his workload, an un- or half-eaten cheeseburger on his desk, a secretary he was in love with ritually humiliating him every time their eyes met. He had a windowless office on the twelfth floor of the old Port Authority Building on Eighth Avenue, and spent most of his life there – including evenings, weekends and days off. I felt a wave of contempt for him.

‘Whatever,’ I said. ‘Look Mark, I’ll talk to you on Monday.’

When I got off the phone I started making some notes on a possible shape for the series and within about two hours had come up with a proposal for ten titles, including a brief outline and a list of key illustrations for each one. But then – what was the next step going to be? I needed to be commissioned to do this. I couldn’t just work in a vacuum.

Mark’s attitude and lack of interest was still bugging me, so I decided to call up Meltzer and put the idea to him. I knew Mark and Artie didn’t get along too well and that Artie would be happy for an opportunity to lean on Mark, but as to whether Artie would actually go for the proposal itself or not was another question.

I got through to him straightaway and started talking. I don’t know where it all came from but by the end of the conversation I practically had Meltzer restructuring the whole company, with the twentieth-century series the centrepiece of its new spring list. He wanted to meet me for dinner, but he and his wife had been invited to the Hamptons for the weekend, and he couldn’t get out of that – his wife would kill him. He seemed agitated, though, unwilling to hang up, as if he felt this great opportunity was already beginning to slip out of his hands…

Next week, I said, we’ll meet next week.

I spent the rest of the day copywriting the telecommunications manual for Mark and expanding on the notes for Artie – without seeing any contradiction in this, without giving any thought to the fact that perhaps, just maybe, by my actions, I might have endangered Mark Sutton’s job.

In terms of the MDT hit itself, though – on that Thursday and Friday – there was nothing markedly different about it, no particular pleasure thing going on, but there was – as before – what I can only describe as this unrelenting fucking surge of having to be busy. There was nothing for me to do in the apartment, because all of that had been done – unless of course I wanted to redecorate the place, change the furniture, paint the walls, tear up the old floorboards, which I didn’t – so I had no choice but to channel all of my energy into the copywriting and notes. And you must bear in mind what that kind of work normally involves. It might, for instance, involve watching Oprah, or sitting idly on the couch with a magazine, or even being in bed, asleep. Work did get done, eventually, but not in any way that you’d notice if you were only around for a day or two, observing.

I slept five hours on the Thursday night, and quite well too, but on the Friday night it wasn’t so easy. I woke at 3.30 a.m., and lay in bed for about an hour before I finally surrendered and got up. I put on a pot of coffee and took a dose of MDT – which meant that by 5 a.m. I was back in full gear, but with nothing concrete to do. Nevertheless, I managed to stay in all day and occupy myself. I pored over the Italian grammar books I’d bought but never studied when I lived in Bologna. I’d picked up enough Italian to get by on, and even enough to get away with doing simple translations, but I’d never studied the language in any formal way. Most Italians I’d known wanted to practise their English, so it had always been easy to skate along with minimal skills. But I now spent a few hours picking through the tense system, as well as other key grammatical stuff – the subjunctive, comparatives, pronouns, reflexives – and the curious thing was, I recognized it all, realized I knew these things, found myself continually going Yeah, of course, that’s what that is.

I did a series of advanced exercises in one of the books and got them all right. I then dug out an old number of a weekly news magazine I had, Panorama, and as I scanned the snippets about local politicians and fashion designers and soccer managers, and went through a lengthy article on Viagra, I could feel whole glaciers of passive vocabulary shifting loose and floating up to the forefront of my conscious mind. After that, I took down a copy of Alessandro Manzoni’s classic novel I promessi sposi that I’d bought with the best of intentions but had never tackled, never even opened. I wouldn’t have had a hope of understanding it in any case, much like an elementary student of English trying to read Bleak House, but I started into it regardless, and was soon surprised to find myself enjoying its remarkably vivid reconstruction of early seventeenth-century life in Lombardy. In fact, when I put the book down after about 200 pages, I barely noticed at all that I’d been reading in a foreign language. And the reason I stopped wasn’t because I’d lost interest, but because I was continually being distracted by the notion that my spoken Italian might now be on a par with this – with my new level of reading comprehension.

I paused for a few moments and then took out my address book. I looked up the phone number of an old friend of mine in Bologna and dialled it. I checked the time as I waited. It would be the middle of the afternoon over there.

‘Pronto.’

‘Ciao Giorgio, sono Eddie, da New York.’

‘Eddie? Cazzo! Come stai?’

‘Abbastanza bene. Senti Giorgio, volevo chiederti una cosa…’ – and so on. It wasn’t until we were about half an hour into the conversation – and had discussed the Mexico situation in some depth, and Giorgio’s marriage break-up, and this year’s spumante – that Giorgio suddenly realized we were speaking in Italian. We’d nearly always spoken in English, with whatever conversations we might have had in Italian being about pizza toppings or the weather.

He was amazed, and I had to tell him I’d been taking intensive lessons.

When I got off the phone with Giorgio, I continued reading I promessi sposi and had it finished by midday. After that I plundered a book on Italian history – a general survey – and got caught up in a trail of references and cross-references about emperors, popes, city states, invasions, cholera, unification, fascism… This, in turn, led me to a series of more specific questions about recent history, most of which I couldn’t answer because I didn’t have the relevant reading material – questions about Mussolini’s deal with the Vatican in 1929, CIA involvement in the elections of 1948, the P2 Masonic lodge, the Red Brigades, Aldo Moro’s kidnapping and murder in the late 1970s… Bettino Craxi in the ’80s, Di Pietro and tangentopoli in the ’90s. I had a visceral sense of the huddled, eventful centuries rapidly succeeding one another, then toppling like pillars, crashing helplessly down towards the present and breaking up into the anxious, fevered decades, years, months. I could feel the webs of conspiracy and deceit – the stories, the murders, the infidelities – spindling back and forth across time, spindling back and forth, virtually, across my skin. I was convinced, too, that with an intense enough concentration of will all of this could be held together in the mind, and understood, perceived as a physical entity with an identifiable chemical structure… seen almost, and touched, even if only for a fleeting moment…

By early on Saturday evening, however, as I sensed the MDT beginning to wear off, it has to be said that my zeal for understanding the complex polymers of history became somewhat muted. So I took another tablet. But by doing this, of course, I changed the dynamic of the whole thing and fragmented any sense of time or structure I had in my life at that point. Taking the drug again without a break also seemed to have the effect of increasing its intensity, with the result that I soon realized I couldn’t stay in the apartment any longer and simply had to go out.

I phoned Dean and met him an hour later at Zola’s on MacDougal. It took me a while to modulate my voice, to modulate the rate at which I was producing labyrinthine syntax, to modulate myself, basically – because apart from the couple of telephone conversations I’d had, this meeting with Dean was my first serious encounter with anyone since I’d started taking the MDT, and my first face-to-face encounter, so I wasn’t sure how I was going to feel, or how I’d be coming across.

Over drinks we quickly got on to discussing Mark Sutton and Artie Meltzer, and I threw out my ideas for the expanded twentieth-century series. But I could see Dean looking at me oddly. I could see his eyebrows furrowing, as doubts about my current state of mental well-being formed in his mind. Dean and I were both freelancers at K & D, having met there a couple of years earlier. We had a healthy disrespect for everything about the company and shared a kind of slacker work ethic, so this talk on my part of editorial proposals and sales projections was unusual to say the least of it. I backed off somewhat, but then found myself expounding paranoid theories about Italian politics to him, and with a little more passion and detail than he would have been used to receiving from me on any subject. The other thing I saw him catching me out on – but which I think prevented him from accusing me of being coked up to my eyeballs – was the fact that I wasn’t smoking. I then decided to add to his confusion by taking a cigarette from him, but just one.

After a while, a few friends of Dean’s arrived and we all had dinner together. There was a middle-aged couple I’d met once before, called Paul and Ruby Baxter, who were both architects, and a young Canadian actress called Susan. Over dinner, we discussed lots of subjects, and it quickly became apparent to everyone present, myself included, that elaborate, scarily articulate views on just about everything were going to be emanating from my end of the table. I got into a protracted argument with Paul about the relative merits of Bruckner and Mahler. I gave them my ’60s spiel, including a brief aside on Raymond Loewy and streamlining. I followed this with further ruminations on Italian history and the nature of time, which in turn developed into a lengthy expostulation on the inadequacies of Western political theory in the face of rapid global change. Once or twice – and it was as though from outside my body, as though from above – I became acutely aware of myself sitting at the table, talking, and for those fleeting moments, as I went on hacking a path through the knotty thickets of syntax and Latinate vocabulary, I had no real sense of what I was saying, no real idea if I was being coherent. Nevertheless, it all seemed to go down quite well – whatever it was – and despite being a bit worried that I was coming on too strong, I detected in Paul the same thing I’d detected earlier in Artie Meltzer, a kind of agitated need to keep talking to me, as though I were buoying him up somehow, empowering him, supplying him with regenerative energy waves. Neither was it my imagination, a bit later, when Susan started flirting with me, casually brushing her arm against mine, holding my gaze. I was able to side-track her by returning to the Bruckner-Mahler debate with Paul – though don’t ask me why, because I was certainly getting bored with that subject, and she was strikingly beautiful.

After dinner, in any case, we went to a string of nightclubs – first to the Duma, then to Virgil’s, then to the Moon and later to Hexagon. I don’t remember exactly when, but I took another dose of MDT in a bathroom somewhere. What I do remember is that harsh, neon-bright toilety atmosphere, people reflected in mirrors all around me, some locked into teeth-grinding, out-of-focus conversations, others slumped up against white tiles, staring at themselves – drunk, wired, bewildered – as though they’d accidentally fallen out of their own lives.

I remember feeling electric.

An increasingly bewildered Dean went home some time after two, as did Susan. Other friends of Paul and Ruby’s arrived, followed a while later by friends of theirs. Then Paul and Ruby dropped out. Another hour or two passed and I found myself in a huge apartment on the Upper West Side with a bunch of people I’d never met before. They were all sitting around a glass table doing lines of coke – but still, I was the one out-talking them. Standing up and walking around at a certain point, I caught sight of myself in a large ornate mirror that was hanging above a fake marble fireplace, and realized that I was the centre of attention, and that whatever I was talking about – and God knows it could have been anything – everyone in the room, without exception, was listening to me. At around five o’clock in the morning, or five-thirty, or six – I don’t remember – I went with a couple of guys to a diner on Amsterdam for breakfast. One of them, Kevin Doyle, was an investment banker with Van Loon & Associates and seemed to be saying that he could throw some information my way, good information, and that he could help me set up a portfolio. He kept insisting that we meet during the week, in his office, for lunch, even for coffee, any day that suited.

The other guy just sat there the whole time staring at me.

Eventually – because sooner or later everyone had to go to bed – I found myself alone again. I spent the day criss-crossing the city, mostly on foot, looking at stuff I’d never really paid that much attention to before, like those mammoth apartment buildings on Central Park West, with their roof-towers and Gothic cornices. I wandered down to Times Square, over to Gramercy Park and Murray Hill. I went back in the direction of Chelsea and then down to the Financial District and Battery Park. I did the Staten Island Ferry, standing out on the deck to let the fresh, invigorating wind cut right through me. I caught a subway back uptown, and went to museums and galleries, places I hadn’t been to in years. I went to a recital of chamber music at Lincoln Center, ate brunch at Julian’s, read the New York Times in Central Park and caught two Preston Sturges movies in a revival theatre in the West Village.

Later on, I hooked up with a few people back in Zola’s and got home to bed, finally, some time in the early hours of Monday morning.

9

AFTER THAT, THE FOLLOWING three or four weeks fused into one another, into one long stretch of… elasto-time. I was permanently… what? Up? High? Stoned? Out of it? Tripping? Buzzed? Wired? Chillin’? None of these terms is appropriate, or adequate, to describe the experience of being on MDT. But – regardless of what term you use – I was a certified MDT user now, taking one, sometimes two, doses of the stuff a day, and just about managing to snatch the odd hour of sleep here and there. I had a sense that I – or, rather, my life – was expanding exponentially and that before long the various spaces I occupied, physical and otherwise, were not going to be sufficient to contain me, and would consequently be put under a great deal of strain, maybe even to breaking point.

I lost weight. I also lost track, so I don’t know over what period of time I lost the weight exactly, but it must have been about eight or ten days. My face thinned out a little, and I felt lighter, and trimmer. It’s not that I wasn’t eating, I was – but I was eating mostly salads and fruit. I cut out cheese and bread and meat and potato-chips and chocolate. I didn’t drink any beer or sodas, but I did drink lots of water.

I was active.

I got my hair cut.

And bought new clothes. Because it was as much as I could bear to go on living in my apartment on Tenth Street, with its musty smells and creaky floorboards, but I certainly didn’t have to put up with a wardrobe that made me feel like an extension of the apartment. So I took out two thousand dollars from the envelope in the closet and wandered over to SoHo. I checked out a few stores, and then took a cab up to Fifth Avenue in the Fifties. In the space of about an hour, I bought a charcoal wool suit, a plain cotton shirt and an Armani silk tie. Then I got a pair of tan leather shoes at A. Testoni. I also got some casual stuff at Barney’s. It was more money than I’d ever spent on clothes in my entire life, but it was worth it, because having new, expensive things to wear made me feel relaxed and confident – and also, it has to be said, like someone else. In fact, to get the measure of myself in the new suit – the way you might test-drive a car – I took to the streets a couple of times, and walked up and down Madison Avenue, or around the financial district, weaving briskly in and out through the crowds. On these occasions, I would often catch glimpses of myself reflected in office windows, in dark slabs of corporate glass, catch glimpses of this trim-looking guy who seemed to know precisely where he was going and, moreover, precisely what he would be doing when he got there.

I spent money on other things, as well, sometimes going into expensive shops and seeking out pretty, elegantly dressed sales assistants, and buying things, randomly – a Mont Blanc fountain pen, a Pulsar watch – just to have that infantile and vaguely narcotic-erotic sensation of being wrapped in a veil of perfume and personal attention – Would sir like to try this one? With men I would be more aggressive, getting into detailed questions and information-swapping, such as the time I bought a boxed-set of Beethoven’s nine symphonies recorded live on original instruments, and locked the assistant into a debate about the contemporary relevance of eighteenth-century performing practice. My behaviour with waiters and barmen, too, was uncharacteristic. When I went out to places like Soleil and La Pigna and Ruggles – which I’d started doing fairly regularly now – I was an awkward customer… there’s no other word for it. I’d spend an unconscionable amount of time poring over the wine list, for example, or I’d order stuff that wasn’t on the menu, or I’d invent some complicated new cocktail, on the spot, and expect the barman to mix it for me.

Later, I’d go to sets at Sweet Basil and the Village Vanguard and start chatting with people at adjoining tables, and while my extensive knowledge of jazz usually ensured that I came out ahead in any conversation, it would also sometimes get people’s backs up. It’s not that I was being obnoxious, exactly, I wasn’t, but I engaged with everyone, and in a very focused way, on whatever level, about whatever subject, squeezing each encounter for its last possible drop of what might be on offer – intrigue, conflict, tedium, trivia, gossip… it didn’t matter. Most people I came across weren’t used to this, and some even found it quite unnerving.

Increasingly, too, I was aware of the effect I was having on certain women I met – or sometimes not even met but just saw… across a few tables, or a crowded room. There appeared to be this curious, wide-eyed attraction that I couldn’t really account for, but which led to some intimate, revealing conversations, and occasionally, too – because I was unsure of the parameters here – some fairly fraught ones. Then one time, during a Dale Noonan gig at Sweet Basil, this pale, thirtyish redhead I’d noticed came over between numbers and sat at my table. She smiled, but didn’t say anything. I smiled back and didn’t say anything either. I summoned a waiter and was about to ask her what she’d like to drink when she shook her head slightly and said, ‘Non.’

I paused, and then asked the waiter for the check. As we were leaving, with the frenetic Dale Noonan just starting up again, I saw her glancing back at the table she’d originally been sitting at. I glanced back as well. Another woman and a man were at the table, looking towards us, perhaps gesturing uncertainly, and in this fleeting tableau of body language I thought I detected a rising sense of alarm, maybe even of panic. But as soon as we got outside, the red-haired woman took me by the arm, almost pushing me along the street, and said, ‘Oh my God’ – in a very strong French accent – ‘that screaming brass shit, I couldn’t stand it any longer.’ Then she laughed and squeezed my arm, drawing me towards her, as though we’d known each other for years.

Her name was Chantal and she was here on vacation, from Paris, with her sister and brother-in-law. I tried to speak to her in French, not very successfully, which seemed to charm her no end, and after about twenty minutes I felt as though I had known her for years. As we walked along Fifth Avenue towards the Flatiron Building, I gave her the 23 Skidoo spiel, tales of cops shooing away young men who used to gather on Twenty-third Street to see passing women’s skirts billowing up in the gusts of wind. These gusts were caused by the narrow angle at the building’s northern end, an explanation which then degenerated into a lecture on wind-bracing and early skyscraper construction, just what you’d imagine a girl in such circumstances would want, but I somehow managed – apparently – to make talk of K-trusses and wall-girders interesting, funny, compelling even. At Twenty-third Street she stood in front of the Flatiron Building herself, waiting for something to happen, but there was barely a breeze that evening and about the only thing detectable in the folds of her long navy skirt was a gentle rippling movement. She seemed disappointed and looked as if she was about to stamp her foot.

I took her by the hand and we walked on.

When we got as far as Twenty-ninth Street, on Fifth Avenue, we turned right. A moment later she told me that we’d arrived at her hotel. She said that she and her sister had been shopping all day, and that that would explain the bags and boxes and tissue paper and new shoes and belts and accessories strewn about the place. When I looked slightly puzzled, she sighed and said I wasn’t to mind the mess up in her room.

The next morning we had breakfast in a local diner, and after that we spent a few hours at the Met. Since Chantal had another week left in New York, we agreed to meet again, and again – and, inevitably, again. We spent one entire twenty-four hour period together locked in her hotel room, during which time, among other things, I took French lessons. I think she was amazed at how much of the language I managed to learn, and how quickly, because by the time of our last encounter, in a Moroccan restaurant in Tribeca, we were speaking almost exclusively in French.

Chantal told me that she loved me and was prepared to give up everything in order to come and live with me in Manhattan. She’d give up her flat in Bastille, her job with a foreign aid agency, her whole Parisian life. I really enjoyed being with Chantal, and hated the thought of her leaving, but I had to talk her out of this. Never having had it so easy in a relationship, I didn’t want to push my luck. But I also didn’t see how our relationship could plausibly be sustained in the wider context of my burgeoning MDT habit. In any case, the way we’d met had been fairly unreal – an unreality which had been further compounded by the personal details I’d given her about myself. I’d told her that I was an investment analyst devising a new market forecasting strategy based on complexity theory. I’d also told her that the reason I hadn’t taken her to see my apartment on Riverside Drive was because I was married – unhappily, of course. The parting scene was difficult, but it was nevertheless nice to be told – through tears, and in French – that I would live for ever in her heart.

There were a couple of other encounters, too. One morning I went to my friend Dean’s place on Sullivan Street to pick up a book, and as I was leaving the building I got talking to a young woman who lived on the second floor. According to the bullet-point profile of his neighbours Dean had once reeled off, she was a single-white-female computer-programmer, twenty-six, non-smoker, interested in nineteenth-century American art. We’d passed each other on the stairs a few times before, but in the way of things in New York City apartment buildings, what with alienation and paranoia, not to mention endemic rudeness, we’d completely ignored each other. This time I smiled at her and said, ‘Hi. Great day.’ She looked startled, studied me for a nanosecond or two, and then replied, ‘If you’re Bill Gates. Or Naomi Campbell.’

‘Well, maybe,’ I said, pausing to lean back against the wall, casually, ‘but hey, if things are that bad, can I buy you a drink?’

She looked at her watch and said, ‘A drink? It’s ten-thirty in the morning – what are you, the crown prince of Toyland?’

I laughed. ‘I might be.’

She was holding an A & P shopping bag in her left hand and under her right arm she had a large hardcover volume, lodged tightly so it wouldn’t slip. I nodded at the book.

‘What are you reading?’

She released a long sigh, as if to say, Fellah, I’m busy, OK… maybe some other time. The sigh then tapered off and she said, wearily, ‘Thomas Cole. The works of Thomas Cole.’

‘View from Mount Holyoke,’ I said automatically. ‘Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm – The Oxbow.’ It was as much as I could do to resist continuing with, ‘Eighteen thirty-six. Oil on Canvas, fifty-one-and-a-half inches by seventy-six inches.’

She furrowed her eyebrows and looked at me for a moment. Then she lowered the shopping bag and put it down at her feet. She eased the large book out from under her arm, held it awkwardly and started flicking through it.

‘Yeah,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘The Oxbow – that’s the one. I’m doing this…’ She continued flicking distractedly through the book. ‘I’m doing this paper for a course I’m taking on Cole and… yeah,’ she looked up at me, ‘The Oxbow.’

She found the page and half held it out, but for us both to look at the painting properly we had to move a little closer together. She was quite short, had dark silky hair and was wearing a green headscarf inset with little amber beads.

‘Remember,’ I said, ‘the oxbow is a yoke – a symbol of control over raw nature. Cole didn’t believe in progress, not if progress meant clearing forests and building railroads. Every hill and valley, he once wrote – and in a fairly ill-advised foray into poetry I might add – every hill and valley is become an altar unto Mammon.’

‘Hhm.’ She paused to consider this. Then she seemed to be considering something else. ‘You know about this stuff?’

I’d been to the Met with Chantal a week earlier and had absorbed a good deal of information from catalogues and wall-mounted copy-blocks and I’d also recently read American Visions by Robert Hughes, as well as heaps of Thoreau and Emerson, so I felt comfortable enough saying, ‘Yeah, sure. I wouldn’t be an expert or anything, but yeah.’ I leant forward slightly, and around, and studied her face, her eyes. She met my gaze. I said, ‘Do you want me to help you with this… paper?’

‘Would you?’ she said in small voice. ‘Can you… I mean, if you’re not busy?’

‘I’m the crown prince of Toyland, remember, so it’s not like I have a job to go to.’

She smiled for the first time.

We went into her apartment and in about two hours did a rough draft of the paper. About four hours after that again I finally staggered out of the building.

Another time I was in the offices of Kerr & Dexter, dropping off some copy, when I bumped into Clare Dormer. Although I’d only met Clare once or twice before, I greeted her very warmly. She’d just been in with Mark Sutton discussing some contractual matter, so I decided to tell her my idea about confining her book to boys, starting with Leave it to Beaver and taking it as far as The Simpsons and then calling it Raising Sons: From Beaver to Bart. She laughed generously at this and slapped the back of her hand against my jacket lapel.

Then she paused, as though something she hadn’t realized before was suddenly dawning on her.

Twenty minutes later we were down in a quiet stairwell together on the twelfth floor, sharing a cigarette.

I kept reminding myself in these situations that I was playing a role, that the whole thing was an act, but just as often it would occur to me that maybe I wasn’t playing a role at all, and that maybe it wasn’t an act. When I was in the throes of an MDT-induced episode, it was as if my new self could barely make out my old self, could just about see it through a haze, through a smoky window of thick glass. It was like trying to speak a language you once knew but have now largely forgotten, and much as I might have wanted to, I couldn’t simply revert or switch back – at least not without an enormous concentration of will. Often, in fact, it was more comfortable not even to bother – why would I bother? – but one result of this was that I had a slightly less easy time of it with people I knew well, or rather with people who knew me well. Meeting and impressing a total stranger, assuming a new identity, even a new name, was exciting and uncomplicated, but when I met up with someone like Dean, for instance, I always got these looks – these quizzical, probing looks. I could see, too, that he was struggling with it, wanted to challenge me, call me a poseur, a clown, an arrogant fuck, while simultaneously wanting to prolong our time together and spin it out for all it was worth.

I also spoke to my father a couple of times during this period, and that was worse. He was retired and lived on Long Island. He phoned occasionally to see how I was, and we’d chat for a few minutes, but now all of a sudden I was getting caught up in the kind of conversations with him that he’d always craved to have with his son – and the kind that his son had always ungraciously denied him – idle banter about business and the markets. We talked about the tech stocks bubble and when it was going to burst. We talked about the Waldrop CLX merger that had been in all the papers that morning. How would the merger affect share prices? Who would the new CEO be? At first, I could detect a note of suspicion in the old man’s voice, as though he thought I was making fun of him, but gradually he settled into it, seeming to accept that this, finally – after all the arid years of bleeding-heart, tree-hugging crap from his boy – was the way things were meant to be. And if it wasn’t quite that, it wasn’t a million miles off it either. I did get involved, and perhaps for the first time ever I spoke to him just as I would speak to any other man. But I was careful at the same time not to go overboard, because it wasn’t like messing with Dean’s head. This was my father on the other end of the line, my father – getting animated, working things out, permitting long dormant hopes to sprout in his mind, and almost audibly… pop! – would Eddie get a proper job now? – pop! – make some real money? – pop! – produce a grandchild?

I’d get off the phone after one of these sessions with him and feel exhausted, as if I somehow had produced a grandchild, unaided, spawned some distant, accelerated version of myself right there on the living-room floor. Then, like in a nature documentary time-lapse sequence, the old me – twisted, cracked, biodegradable – would shrivel up suddenly and disintegrate, making the struggle to recover any meaningful sense of who I really was even more difficult.

But moments of anxiety like this were fairly rare, and my abiding impression of the period is of how right it felt to be so busy all the time. I wasn’t idle for a second. I read new biographies of Stalin, Henry James and Irving Thalberg. I learnt Japanese from a series of books and cassette tapes. I played chess online, and did endless cryptic puzzles. I phoned in to a local radio station one day to take part in a quiz, and won a year’s supply of hair products. I spent hours on the Internet and learned how to do various things – without, of course, actually having to do any of them. I learned how to arrange flowers, for example, cook risotto, keep bees, dismantle a car engine.

One thing I did want to do for real, though, and had always wanted to do was learn how to read music. I found a website that explained the whole process in detail, rapidly deconstructing for me the mysteries of treble and bass clefs, chords, signatures and so on. I went out and bought a stack of sheet music, basic stuff, a few well-known songs, as well as more challenging stuff, a couple of concertos and a symphony (Mahler’s Second). Within a matter of hours I’d worked my way through everything except the Mahler, which I then approached with caution, not to say reverence. Being so complex, it took me a good deal longer, but I eventually managed to find my way through its magnificent swirl of aching melodies and horror-show fanfares, its soaring strings and stirring chorales. At about two o’clock in the morning, in the eerie silence of my living-room, as I reached the mighty E-flat climax – Was du geschlagen, Zu Gott wird es dich tragen! – I felt one of those goosebump shivers rippling through my entire body, and tears welled up in my eyes.

The next step from this was to see if I could play music, so I headed off to Canal Street and bought myself a relatively inexpensive electric keyboard and then set it up beside the computer. I followed an online course and started practising scales and elementary exercises, but this wasn’t at all easy and I very nearly gave up. After a few days, however, something seemed to click and I started being able to pick out a few decent tunes. Within a week, I was playing Duke Ellington and Bill Evans numbers, and soon after that I was actually doing my own improvisations.

For a while, I envisaged club dates, European tours, rain showers of record-executive business cards, but it didn’t take me long to realize something crucial: I was good, but I wasn’t that good. I could play ‘Stardust’ and ‘It Never Entered My Mind’, passably, and would probably be able to play both books of ‘The Well-Tempered Clavier’ if I worked at it non-stop for the next 500 hours – but the question was, did I really want to spend the next five hundred hours practising the piano?

For that matter, I suppose, just what did I want to do?

It was around this time, therefore, that I started feeling restless. I came to realize that if I was going to go on taking MDT, I would need some kind of focus and structure in my life, and that flitting from one interest to another wasn’t going to be enough. I needed a plan, a credible course of action – I needed to be working.

I also had a more immediate question to deal with. What was I going to do with the 450 or so tablets? Some of them could be sold at $500 a piece, so the obvious thing I considered doing was, well… dealing them – and dealing them myself. But how, exactly, was I going to do this? Hang out on the street corner? Hawk them around nightclubs? Try and shift them in bulk to some scary guy with a gun in a hotel room? There were too many complications, and too many variables. Besides, it didn’t take me long to see that even if I did get full price for even half of the tablets, $120,000 at the end of the day was nothing compared to the potential gains there could be from just ingesting them, and using them creatively, judiciously. I had more or less finished Turning On, for instance, and could easily knock off others in a series like that.

So what else could I do?

I sketched out possible projects. One idea was to withdraw Turning On from Kerr & Dexter and develop it into a full-length study – expand the text and cut back on the illustrations. Another idea was to do a screenplay based on the life of Aldous Huxley, focusing on his days in LA. I considered doing a book on the economic and social history of some commodity, cigars maybe, or opium, or saffron, or chocolate, or silk, something that could be tied in, later on, to a lavishly produced TV documentary series. I thought about putting out a magazine, or starting a translation agency, or setting up a film production company, or devising a new Internet-based service… or – I don’t know – inventing and patenting an electronic gadget that would become indispensable, achieve world-wide brand-recognition in six months to a year and establish my place in the great twentieth-century pantheon of eponyms – Kodak, Ford, Hoover, Bayer… Spinola.

But the drawback with all of these ideas was that they were either too unoriginal or too quixotic. They’d each take a lot of time and capital to set up, and there was no guarantee in the end – regardless of how fucking smart I was – that any of them would work, or have enough appeal to be marketable. So the next thing I considered was the possibility of going back to school to do a post-graduate course. With a prudent use of MDT I could accumulate credits fairly quickly and shortcut my way to a belated career in… something, but the problem was – in what? Law? Architecture? Dentistry? Some branch of science? Even listing these options was enough to take me back twenty years and start my head spinning. And did I really want to get into all of that shit again – exams, term papers, dealing with professors? The mere thought of it was enough to make me throw up.

So what, then – I asked myself – was I left with?

Well, what do you think? Making money.

Making money… how?

By making telephone calls.

Hhn?

The stock market, stupid.

10

IT SEEMED LIKE THE obvious thing. I’d been reading the financial sections every day in the newspapers, having those chats with the old man, even spinning elaborate stories to strange women about being an investment analyst, so the next step was surely to get involved for real, and in some practical way – by day-trading on my PC at home maybe, in options, futures, derivatives, whatever. It would be better than any job I could find, and of course playing the markets had the added attraction of being the new rock-and-roll. The only problem was that I didn’t have a clear enough understanding of what options, futures and derivatives actually were – not enough, in any case, to start trading in them. I could bluff my way through a conversation, sure, but that wasn’t going to be much use when it came to putting some real money on the table.

What I needed was an hour or two with someone who could explain in detail how the markets worked and then show me the mechanics of day-trading. I thought of Kevin Doyle, that guy I’d had breakfast with a couple of Sundays back, the one who worked for Van Loon & Associates, but as I remembered he was fairly intense and the kind of Wall Street suit who’d probably scoff at the notion of day-trading on a PC. So I phoned around some business journalists I knew and put it out that I was doing a section for a new K & D book on the whole day-trading phenomenon. I got a call back from one of them saying he could set up an interview for me with a friend of his who’d been day-trading online for the past year and would be more than willing to talk about it. The arrangement was that I’d go to this person’s apartment, chat, take notes and watch him in action.

The guy’s name was Bob Holland and he lived on East Thirty-third and Second. He greeted me in boxer shorts, led me down a hallway into his living-room and asked if I wanted a hit of espresso. The room was dominated by a long, mahogany table that had three computer terminals on it and a Gaggia espresso machine. There was an exercise bike between the far end of the table and the wall. Bob Holland was about forty-five, lean and wiry, and had thinning grey hair. He stood in front of one of the terminals, staring at the screen.

‘This is the lair of the beast, Eddie, so you’ll have to, er…’ He pulled distractedly at his boxers with one hand, simultaneously keying something in to the computer with the other, ‘… you’ll have to excuse the dress-code.’ Still distracted, he pointed to the Gaggia and half whispered the word espresso.

I busied myself with the coffee machine and looked around as I waited for him to speak again. Apart from the table and the immediate space around it, the room had a neglected feel. It was dark and musty and looked like it hadn’t been vacuumed in a while. The furniture and décor, as well, were more than a little fussy – too fussy, I thought, for this Spartan and focused warrior of the Nasdaq.

I figured that he’d probably been divorced in the last three to six months.

Suddenly, after a long bout of intense concentration and intermittent key-stroking – during which I sipped my espresso – Holland started speaking. ‘Many people believe that when you buy a share of stock you are buying a proportional share in a business.’ He spoke slowly, as though delivering a lecture, but continued to stare at the screen. ‘Consequently, to figure out how much any proportional share is worth, you have to determine how much the business is worth. It’s known as “fundamental” analysis, and it’s where you look at the company’s basic financial health – growth potential, projected earnings, cash flow, that kind of thing.’ He paused, stroked a few more keys and then went on. ‘Others look at the numbers only, with almost no regard for the underlying business or its current valuation. These are quantitative analysts, or “quants”. Number crunchers. They consider judgements about things like management expertise and market potential to be too subjective. They buy and sell on a purely quantitative basis, using sophisticated algorithms to find minute price discrepancies in the markets.’ He glanced at me briefly. ‘Yeah?’

I nodded.

‘Then you’ve got technical analysis. That’s where you study price-and-volume patterns and basically try to understand the psychology surrounding a stock.’

He continued looking at the screen as he spoke, and I continued nodding.

‘But trading is not an exact science, Eddie. I mean, the stock market can’t be pinned down to any one system, which is why you get fuzzy talk of “irrational exuberance”, and people trying to explain market behaviour in terms of psychiatry, biology, and even brain chemistry. I’m not kidding you – there were actually suggestions recently that investor caution was being inhibited by the high percentage of brokers and dealers on Prozac. So,’ he shrugged his shoulders, ‘given that no one knows anything, it’s not surprising that most investors use a combination of the three basic approaches I’ve outlined to you.’

Over the next hour or so, still standing at the table – and looking like he’d just stepped in from a vigorous game of tennis – Bob Holland expanded on these ideas and also went into the minutiae of options, futures, derivatives, as well as bonds, hedge funds, global markets and so on. I took a few notes, but when I heard the explanations I realized that in a general way I did understand these terms, and that furthermore, just by thinking about this stuff, a large store of knowledge was being unlocked in my brain, knowledge that I had probably accumulated unconsciously over the years.

When he’d done with the big picture – how the investment banks and fund managers operated – he started in on day-trading.

‘Then you’ve got guys like me,’ he said, ‘the new pariahs of Wall Street. Ten years ago it was the LBO types, the Gordon Gekkos. Now it’s the geeks in baseball caps who sit in front of computers at home and trade thirty or forty times a day, picking off eighths, sixteenths, even thirty-seconds of a point per share, and then closing out their positions before the end of trading.’ He looked away from the screen and directly at me, for maybe the second or third time since I’d arrived. ‘We’re accused of distorting the markets and causing volatility in share prices, but that’s bullshit. It’s what they said in the Eighties about the takeover guys. We’re just the new wave, Eddie – electronic day-trading is the spawn of technology and regulatory change. It’s that simple, it’s flux, it’s the nature of things.’ He shrugged his shoulders again and turned back to the screen.

‘I mean, come here – look at this.’

I stepped over quickly and stood behind him. On the middle screen, the one he was working at, I could see tightly packed columns of figures and fractions and percentages. He pointed to something on the screen – ATRX, a stock symbol for a biotech company – and said, ‘This one opened at around sixty dollars a share and has just pulled back a little so its bid is now 59⅜… and its offer…’ he pointed to another part of the screen, ‘is 59¾ – that’s a ⅜ spread. Now the thing is, thanks to the latest software, and to regulatory changes introduced by the Securities & Exchange Commission, I can trade within that spread, and right here in my living-room.’

He highlighted the row of figures after the ATRX symbol and stared at it for a while. He checked something on one of the other screens, came back to the first one and keyed something in. He waited for a couple of moments and keyed something else in. He waited again – one hand held up in mid-air – and then said, quietly, ‘Yes.’

He turned around to me and explained what he’d done. Using that new trading programme, he’d discovered that there were three marketmakers on ATRX’s bid and two on the offer. Reckoning that ATRX would rebound, he took advantage of the wide spread by bidding 59 for 2,000 shares, which was over the best market-maker bid. Having topped this bid, Holland then got first in line to execute an order. The first 2,000 shares for sale at market went to him at 59. Very soon after this he offered to sell for 59, which was still lower than the ask price posted by the big market-makers. Holland had guessed right, and the stock was taken off his hands almost immediately. In just fifteen seconds and a few strokes of the keyboard he had netted over $500 and cut the spread by of a point.

I asked him how many trades like this he made every day.

Holland smiled for the first time. He said he made about thirty trades each day, mostly in lots of 1,000 or 2,000 shares, and rarely held a stock for more than ten minutes.

He smiled again and said, ‘OK, they’re not all like that one, but a lot of them are.’ He paused. ‘It’s about identifying ripples in the charts and then reacting quickly.’

‘You mean, it’s not just about who has the most information?’

‘Shit no. With all the indicators that are available these days, you just end up with conflicting signals. Shit no.’

Now that I had his attention, I bombarded him with more questions. How much preparation did he do for each trading day? How many positions did he keep open at any one time? What kind of commissions did he pay?

As Holland answered each of my questions, he gradually pulled himself away from the computer screens on the table. Then he started making himself an espresso, but by the time it was ready and he was drinking it, he seemed to have become sufficiently detached from his work to notice again that he was wearing nothing but boxer shorts, and to be self-conscious about it. He knocked back the remainder of the espresso, excused himself and wandered off down the hall into what I assumed was a bedroom.

In his absence, I went over to look at the computer screens again. It was amazing… he had made $500 – the price of one hit of MDT – in just fifteen seconds! I definitely wanted to learn how to do this, because if Bob Holland could execute thirty orders in a day, I was sure that I could manage a hundred, or more. When he came back, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, I asked him how I should go about learning. He told me that the best way to get into day-trading was to just do it – trade, and that most of the online brokers facilitated this by giving free access to simulated trading games and by conducting live tutorials.

‘Simulation games’, he said, in a tone that was becoming increasingly stilted, ‘are an excellent way of developing your skills, Eddie, and of gaining confidence in placing trades but without actually having to take any risks.’

I got him to recommend some online brokers and software trading packages, and as I wrote this stuff down I kept firing questions at him. Holland answered everything I asked him, and comprehensively, but I could see that he was becoming slightly alarmed, as if the rate and nature of my questions was perhaps more than he’d bargained for – as if he felt that by answering them, by passing on this information, he might be unleashing some kind of Frankenstein monster into cyberspace, some desperate, hungry individual capable of who-knew-what financial atrocities.

It had taken a while, but Holland was completely focused on me now. In fact, he appeared more concerned with each new question and started introducing a cautionary note into his answers.

‘So look, start small, start by trading hundred-share lots for the first month or so, or at least until you find your feet…’

‘Hhm.’

‘… and don’t get too excited if you have a good day – one good day’s trading doesn’t mean you’re Warren Buffet. The next trade you make could just as easily blow your account out…’

‘Hhm.’

‘… and when you enter a trade, make sure you have an idea of how you expect it to behave, because if it acts counter to that – get out!’

My impulse was to go Yeah, yeah, yeah to all of this, and Holland could see that. But the reason he wasn’t getting through to me was because the more he warned me about the potential dangers of day-trading, the more excited I could feel myself becoming at the prospect of actually getting home and doing it.

As I was slipping my notebook into my jacket pocket, and then putting the jacket on to go, Holland upped the pace a little.

‘Trading can get pretty intense, you know.’ He paused, and then said all at a rush, ‘Don’t ever borrow money from family or friends, Eddie – I mean to trade, or to get yourself out of a trading crisis.’ I looked at him, slightly alarmed myself now. ‘And don’t start lying to hide your losses either.’

There was a hint of desperation in his voice. I got the impression that he wasn’t so much talking to me as about himself. I also got the impression that he didn’t want me to leave.

I did, however, and badly – but I hesitated. I stood in the middle of the room and listened as he told me how he’d left his job as a marketing director to start day-trading and how within six months his wife had left him. He told me that he got restless and irritable whenever he couldn’t trade – like on Sundays, for example, or in the middle of the night – and that trading had effectively become his entire life. He went on to say that he was incapable of accumulating cash in his account and often didn’t even bother to open his brokerage statements.

‘Because you don’t want to face up to the extent of your losses?’ I said.

He nodded.

Then he went deeper into confessional mode and started talking about his addictive personality and how if it hadn’t been one thing in his life it had been another…

During all of this, the only thing I could think of was how sublime, how like a brief but intricate jazz solo that little fifteen-second passage of electronic commerce had been. Pretty soon, I couldn’t even make out what Holland was saying any more, not clearly, because I was gone, lost in a sudden, intoxicating reverie of possibilities. Holland, I realized, had been stumbling around in the dark, shaving off the occasional sixteenth of a point here or there, quite obviously getting it wrong more often than he was getting it right. But this wasn’t going to be the case with me. I would know what to do instinctively. I would know what stocks to buy, and when to buy them, and why.

I would be good at this.

When I eventually got away and returned to Tenth Street, my head was still reeling. But then, when I opened the door of the apartment and stepped into the living-room, I immediately felt oppressed, felt outsized – like Alice, like I’d soon be curling an arm round my head and sticking an elbow out of the window, just to fit in the place. I began to feel somewhat aggrieved, too, as though impatient that I hadn’t already made lots of money from day-trading – aggrieved and in desperate visceral need of things… another new suit, a couple of new suits, and shoes, several pairs of them, as well as new shirts and ties, and maybe other new stuff, a better hi-fi system, a DVD player, a laptop, proper air-conditioning, and just more rooms, more corridor space, higher ceilings. I had the nagging sense that unless I was moving forward, moving up, unless I was transmuting, transmogrifying, morphing into something else, I was probably going to, I don’t know, explode…

I put on the scherzo from Bruckner’s Ninth and marched around the apartment, like a one-man panzer division, muttering to myself, weighing up the options. How was I to move forward? How was I to get started? But I soon realized that I didn’t have too many options, because the money in the closet had dwindled to a few thousand dollars, which was about as much as there was in my bank account – and since, let’s face it, a few thousand dollars plus a few thousand dollars is still, for all intents and purposes, a few thousand dollars, all I had in the world, then, apart from a credit card, was a few thousand dollars.

Taking what was left in the closet in any case, I went out shopping again. This time I headed for Forty-seventh Street and bought two fourteen-inch TV sets, a laptop computer and three software packages – two for investment-analysis and one for online trading. Disregarding Bob Holland’s idea that too much information led to conflicting signals, I bought the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and the latest issues of The Economist, Barrons, Newsweek, The Nation, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, Fortune, Forbes, Wired, Variety and about ten other weekly and monthly titles. I also got a handful of foreign-language newspapers, ones I’d at least be able to take some kind of a stab at – Il Sole 24 Ore and Corriera della Sera, obviously – but also Le Figaro, El Pais and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Back in my apartment, I phoned a friend who was an electrical engineer and had him instruct me over the phone about how to splice the wires from the two new TV sets into my existing cable connection. He was very uncomfortable about it and wanted to come round and do it himself, but I insisted that he just explain it to me, goddammit – explain it to me over the phone and let me take notes. It was an entirely different matter, OK, from what I might have ventured to do under normal circumstances – change a plug, say, or replace a fuse – but I nevertheless managed to carry out his instructions, rapidly, and to the letter, and as a result I soon had the three TV sets operating side-by-side in the living-room. After that, I hooked up the new laptop to the computer on my desk, installed the software and went online. I did some research into Internet stockbrokers, and used my credit card and a bank transfer to open an account with one of the smaller companies. I then took the newspapers and magazines I’d bought and carefully spread them out around the apartment. I put reading material, open at relevant pages, on to every available surface – desk, table, chairs, shelves, couch, floor.

The next few hours flitted by in what felt like a couple of seconds. I spent them hovering anxiously in front of the five screens, absorbing information – and at a rate that made my previous efforts seem positively glacial. The three TV sets were beaming out different news and financial-service transmissions – CNN, CNNfn and CNBC – different tributaries into the one great global flood of information, analysis and opinion. The online broker I’d registered with – The Klondike Index – provided real-time quotes, expert commentary, news updates and hyperlinks to a variety of research tools and simulation games. On the other computer screen, I visited sites like Bloomberg, The Street.com., Quote.com, Raging Bull and The Motley Fool. I also occasionally took time out to dive-bomb over the acres of newsprint I’d accumulated, and read articles about anything and everything… Mexico, naturally, but also about genetically modified foods, peace talks in the Middle East, Britpop, the downturn in the steel industry, Nigerian crime statistics, e-commerce, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Basque separatists, the international banana trade…

Whatever.

Of course, I had no real idea of what I was doing here, there was no coherent strategy, it was all random, but I’d gravitated to this notion that the more data there was stored in my brain – and wide-ranging data – the more confident I would be when the time actually came to take some of those fabled split-second decisions.

And – come to that – what was I waiting for? I didn’t have much latitude, financially, but if I’d really wanted to, I could have been trading online within a matter of seconds. To place an order, all I had to do was select a stock, enter data about the type of transaction and number of shares required, and then click the Send Order button on the screen.

I resolved to begin the following morning.

Turning around in my swivel-chair at 10 a.m., I paused to survey the apartment. It seemed to have mutated severely in the previous twenty-four hours. Less recognizable than before, less identifiable as a living space, it was now, to use Bob Holland’s word, like the lair of some deranged obsessive. Too far into this to be getting squeamish, however, I swivelled back around to the two computer screens on the desk and set about looking for some suitable stocks to buy. I waded through endless pick lists, insider lists, Street-beater lists, but eventually went with my gut instinct and fixed on a medium-sized software company in Palo Alto called Digicon that I figured to be well placed for some short-term action. It had just gone through a lengthy period of trading within a very narrow price range, but seemed now to be on the point of breaking out of that. In fact, in the space of time it took me to consider Digicon, and to run some relevant data through the analysis programmes, the company’s share price went up by half a point. The account I’d opened with Klondike had steep brokerage fees and charged high interest rates, but they did allow up to 50 per cent leverage on opening deposits. So I sent off an order to buy 200 shares in Digicon, at $14 per share. Over the next half an hour I bought a total of 500 shares in six other companies, using up all my available funds, and then spent the rest of the day tracking these companies, looking for likely sell signals.

During the course of the late morning and early afternoon, all but one of the seven stocks I’d chosen went up in price, and by widely varying degrees. I made quick decisions about which ones to offload. Digicon, for instance, went to 17, but I didn’t think it was going to go any higher, so I sold it and cleared a profit of more than $600 – less the commission and transaction fee, of course. Another stock rose from 18½ points to 24¾, and another from 31 to 36. By offloading each of these stocks at the right time, I managed to increase my basic fund from about $7,000 to nearly $12,000, and in the last two hours of trading I sold off everything except US-Cova. This was the one stock that hadn’t moved all day, despite signals that an uptrend was imminent. I felt irritated by this, because when I’d been choosing these stocks something almost physical had happened to me… a vague, tingling sensation in the pit of my stomach – or so it had seemed at the time. In any case, all of the other stocks had shifted, and I didn’t understand why this one wasn’t complying.

Undeterred, I placed an order for an extra 650 shares in US-Cova, at $22 per share. About twenty minutes later there was a blip on the screen and US-Cova started moving. It went up by two points, then by another three points. I watched as the share price just kept climbing upwards. When it reached $36 I typed in a sell order, but still held out for another increase, and only sent in the order when the share price had hit $39, an increase of $17 in little over an hour.

At close of trading on that first day, therefore, I had more than $20,000 in my account. Take away the initial $7,000 and fees, and that meant I had made somewhere in the region of $12,000 profit in a single day. It was small potatoes on the stock market, obviously, but it was still more than I’d often made in half a year as a freelance copywriter. This was of course amazing, but it also hit me what an incredible run of luck I’d had: seven picks and seven winners, and on an average day of trading where the market had closed only twelve points up. It was extraordinary. So how had I done it? Had it been luck? I tried to go back over the whole thing, to retrace my steps and see if I could identify what signals I’d picked up on, what prompts had led me to these relatively obscure, low-profile stocks in the first place, but it proved an impossibly labyrinthine task. I checked through dozens of trend-lines again, re-ran analysis programmes and at one point found myself crawling across the floor of the apartment over the open pages of broadsheet newspapers and glossy magazines, in search of some article I vaguely remembered reading and that may have suggested something – or sparked off an idea, or led in some other direction, or not. I simply didn’t know. Perhaps I’d heard something on TV, an off-the-cuff remark made by any one of a hundred investment analysts. Or come across something in a chat-room, or on a message-board, or in a webzine.

Trying to reconfigure my mental co-ordinates at the exact moments I’d chosen those stocks was like trying to stuff toothpaste back into a tube, and I soon gave up. But the one conclusion I could draw from this was that I’d probably used fundamental and quantitative analysis in about equal measure, and even though I might not get the proportions exactly the same on the next occasion, and could never recreate the conditions of that particular day, I was certainly on the right track. Unless, of course – intolerable thought – it had all been some kind of a fluke, an epic stroke of beginner’s luck. I didn’t believe that it had been, really, but I still needed to know for sure and was therefore anxious to get trading again the next day. Which meant keeping up the preparatory in-take of data, and – naturally – of MDT-48.

I got three or four hours’ sleep that night, and when I woke up – which was pretty suddenly, thanks to a car-alarm going off – it took me quite a while to work out where, and indeed who, I was. Before the alarm jolted me awake, I’d been in the middle of a particularly vivid dream set in Melissa’s old apartment on Union Street in Brooklyn. Nothing much happened in the dream, really, but it had a guided, virtual-reality feel to it, with tracking shots and detailed close-ups, and even sounds… the evocative whine of the radiators, for example, doors slamming down the hall, kids’ voices rising up from the street below.

The eye of the dream – the POV, the camera – glided low along the pitch-pine floorboards, through the different rooms of this railway apartment, taking in everything, the grain of the wood, each swirling line and knot of it… clumps of dust, a copy of The Nation, an empty bottle of Grolsch, an ashtray. Then, moving slowly upwards, it took in Melissa’s right foot, which was bare, and her crossed legs, which were bare, and the navy silk slip she was wearing, which crumpled as she leant forward, half revealing her breasts. Her long shiny black hair was draped on her shoulders and arms, and partially covered her face. She was sitting in a chair, smoking a cigarette, brooding. She looked fabulous. I was sitting on the floor, looking – I imagined – slightly less fabulous. Then, after what might have been a few seconds, I rose up to my feet, and the point-of-view – dizzyingly – rose up with me. As I turned, everything turned, and in a kind of hand-held pan of the room I took in the mounted black-and-white photographs on the wall, the photographs of old New York that Melissa had always liked so much; I took in the stone mantelpiece of the disused fireplace, and above it, the mirror, and in the mirror – fleetingly – me, wearing that old corduroy jacket I’d had, and looking so thin, so young. Still moving round, I saw the open doors that connected this room to the bedroom at the front, and then, standing framed between the doors I saw Vernon, all hair and smooth skin and in a leather jacket he’d always worn. I got a really good look at him, at his bright green eyes and high cheekbones, and for a couple of seconds he seemed to be talking to me. His lips were moving, though I couldn’t hear anything he was saying…

But then suddenly it was all over, the car-alarm was wailing plaintively down on Tenth Street and I was swinging my legs out of bed – taking deep breaths, feeling as though I’d seen a ghost.

Inevitably, the next image to take up residence inside my head was another one of Vernon, but it was a Vernon of ten or eleven years later – a Vernon with hardly any hair, and with facial features that were disfigured and bruised, a Vernon splayed out on the couch of another apartment, in another part of town…

I stared down at the rug on the floor beside my bed, at its intricate, endlessly replicating patterns, and shook my head very slowly from side to side. Since I’d starting taking the MDT pills a few weeks before, I had hardly given any real thought to Vernon Gant – even though, by any standards, my behaviour towards him had been appalling. After finding him dead I’d as good as ransacked his bedroom for God’s sake, and then stolen cash and property belonging to him. I hadn’t even gone to his funeral service – convincing myself, on no evidence whatsoever, that that was the way Melissa had wanted it.

I stood up from the edge of the bed and quickly walked into the living-room. I took two pills from the ceramic bowl on the wooden shelf above the computer – which I’d been refilling every day – and swallowed them. It was surely the case, too, that the stuff I’d taken rightly belonged to Vernon’s sister now – and whatever about the drugs, Melissa probably could have used that nine grand.

With a knot in my stomach, I reached behind the computers to switch them on. Then I glanced at my watch.

It was 4.58 a.m.

I’d easily be able to give her double that amount now, though – and maybe even a lot more if my second day of trading went well – but wouldn’t that be like paying her off in some way?

All of a sudden I felt sick.

This certainly wasn’t how I’d ever envisaged renewing my acquaintance with Melissa. I rushed into the bathroom and slammed the door behind me. I lowered myself to the floor and into position over the rim of the toilet bowl. But nothing happened, I couldn’t throw up. I remained there for about twenty minutes, breathing heavily, holding my cheek against the cold, white porcelain, until eventually the feeling passed – or, rather, feelings… because the weird thing was, when I stood up again to go back into the living-room and start work at my desk, I no longer felt sick – but I no longer felt guilty either.

Trading that day was brisk. I chose myself another little portfolio of stocks to work on, five middle-sized companies plucked from obscurity, and more or less cleaned up. Earlier on, over coffee, I’d seen references in several newspaper articles – and later, innumerable references on innumerable websites – to US-Cova and its extraordinary performance in the markets the previous day. Digicon and one or two others also got brief mentions, but no coherent picture emerged that could explain what had gone on, or that could link, in any way at all, the various companies concerned. A resounding Go figure appeared to be the general consensus of opinion, so even though the odds against someone randomly picking seven straight winners in a row were truly astronomical, it was still possible at that point, and in the absence of any other evidence, that my initial flush of success had just been a question of luck.

It soon became apparent, however, that something else was at work here. Because – just as on the previous day – whenever I came upon an interesting stock, something happened to me, something physical. I felt what I can only describe as an electric charge, usually just below the sternum, a little surge of energy that quickly rippled through my body and then seemed to spill out into the room’s atmosphere, sharpening colour definition and sound resolution. I felt as though I were connected to some vast system, wired in, a minute but active fibre, pulsating on a circuit board. The first stock I picked, for instance – let’s call it V – started moving up five minutes after I’d sent off the buy-order. I tracked it, while at the same time nosing around the various websites for other things to buy. With growing confidence, therefore, I found myself surfing stocks throughout the early part of the morning, leap-frogging from one to another, selling V at a profit and immediately sinking all of the proceeds from it into W, which in turn got sold off at just the right moment to finance a foray into X.

But as I grew confident, I also grew impatient. I wanted more chips to play with, more capital, more leverage. By mid-morning I had inched my way up to nearly $35,000, which was fine, but to make a proper dent in the market I’d probably need, as a starting point, at least double – but probably three or four times – that amount.

I phoned Klondike, but they didn’t provide leverage of more than 50 per cent. Not having much of a history with my bank manager, I didn’t feel like trying him. Neither did I imagine that anyone I knew would have $75,000 to spare, or that any legitimate loan company would shell out that kind of money over the counter – so, since I wanted the money now, and was fairly confident about what I could do with it, there appeared to be only one other course of action left open to me.

11

I PUT ON A JACKET and left the apartment. I walked along Avenue A, past Tompkins Square Park and down towards Third Street to a diner I often used. The guy behind the counter, Nestor, was a local and knew everything that went on in the neighbourhood. He’d been serving coffee and muffins and cheeseburgers and tuna melts here for twenty years, and had observed all of the radical changes that had taken place, the clean-ups, the gentrification, the sneaky encroachment of high-rise apartment buildings. People had come and gone, but Nestor remained, a link to the old neighbourhood that even I remembered as a kid – Loisaida, the Latino quarter of store-front social clubs, and old men playing dominoes, and salsa and merengue blaring out of every window, and then later the Alphabet City of burned-out buildings and drug pushers and homeless people living in cardboard shelters in Tompkins Square Park. I’d often chatted to Nestor about these changes, and he’d told me stories – a couple of them pretty hair-raising – about various local characters, old-timers, storekeepers, cops, councillors, hookers, dealers, loansharks. But that was the thing about Nestor, he knew everyone – even knew me, an anonymous single white male who’d been living on Tenth Street for about five years and worked as some kind of journalist or something. So when I went into his place, sat at the counter and asked if he knew anyone who could advance me some cash, and fast – extortionate interest rates no obstacle – he didn’t bat an eyelid, but just brought over a cup of coffee and told me to sit tight for a while.

When he’d served a few customers and cleared two or three tables, he came back to my end of the counter, wiped the area around where I was sitting and said, ‘Used to be Italians, yeah? Mostly Italians, until… well…’

He paused.

Until what? Until John Gotti took it in the ass and Sammy the Bull went in the Witness Protection Program? What? Was I supposed to guess? That was another thing about Nestor, he often assumed I knew more than I did. Or maybe he just used to forget who he was talking to.

‘Until what?’ I said.

‘Until John Junior took over. It’s a fucking mess these days.’

I was close.

‘And now?’

‘The Russians. From Brighton Beach. They used to work together, them and the Italians, or at least didn’t work against each other, but now things are different. John Junior’s crews – apparently – couldn’t turn over a cigar stand.’

I never had the measure of Nestor: was he just a fly on the neighbourhood wall, or was he connected in some way? I didn’t know. But then, how would I know? Who the fuck was I?

‘So lately, round here,’ he went on, ‘there’s this guy, Gennady. Comes in most days. He talks like an immigrant, but don’t let that fool you. He’s tough, just as tough as any of his uncles that came out of the Soviet gulags. They think this country is a joke.’

I shrugged my shoulders.

Nestor looked directly at me. ‘These guys are crazy, Eddie. I’m telling you. They’ll cut you around the waist, peel your skin – peel it all the way up to over your head, tie a knot in it and then let you fucking suffocate.’

He let that one sink in.

‘I’m not kidding you. That’s what the mujahedin did to some of the Russian soldiers they captured in Afghanistan. Stuff like that gets passed on. People learn.’ He paused, and did a little more wiping. ‘Gennady comes in, Eddie, I’ll talk to him, but just make sure you know what you’re doing.’

Then he stood away from the counter a little, and said, ‘You been working out? You look terrific.’

I half smiled at him, but didn’t say anything. Clearly puzzled, Nestor moved on to another customer.

I sat there for about an hour and drank four cups of coffee. I glanced at a couple of newspapers, and then spent some time trawling through the expanding database I had between my ears, picking out stuff I’d read about the Russian mafia – the Organizatsiya, Brighton Beach, Little-Odessa-by-the-Sea.

I tried not to think too much about what Nestor had told me.

At around lunch-time, the place got busy and I began to consider the possibility that I was wasting my time, but just as I was about to get up and leave, Nestor nodded to me from behind the counter. I looked around discreetly and saw a guy in his mid-twenties coming in the door. He was lean and wiry and wore a brown leather jacket and sunglasses. He went and sat in an empty booth at the back of the diner. I stayed where I was and watched out of the corner of my eye as Nestor brought him down a cup of coffee and chatted for a few moments.

Nestor came back up to the front, collecting some plates on his way. He put the plates on the counter beside me and whispered, ‘I vouched for you, OK, so go and talk to him.’ Then he pointed a finger at me and said, ‘Don’t fuck up on me, Eddie.’

I nodded and swivelled around on my stool. I strolled down to the back. I slipped into the booth opposite Gennady and nodded hello.

He’d taken the sunglasses off and left them to one side. He had very striking blue eyes, a carefully maintained stubble and was alarmingly thin and chiselled. Heroin? Vanity? Again, what did I know? I waited for him to speak.

But he didn’t. After a ludicrous pause, he made a barely perceptible gesture with his head that I took to mean I could speak. So I cleared my throat and spoke. ‘I’m looking for a short-term loan of seventy-five thousand dollars.’

Gennady played with his left ear-lobe for a moment and then shook his head no.

I waited – waited for him to say something else – but that was obviously it. ‘Why not?’ I said.

He snorted sarcastically. ‘Seventy-five thousand dollars?’ He shook his head again and took a sip from his coffee. He had a very strong Russian accent.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘seventy-five thousand dollars. Is that such a problem? Jesus.’

If it came to it, I knew this guy would probably have no qualms about sticking a knife in my heart – and if Nestor was right that’d only be for starters – but I found his attitude irritating and didn’t feel like playing along.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘a fucking problem. I don’t see you before. And I don’t like you already.’

‘Like me? What the fuck has that got to do with anything? I’m not asking you out on a date here.’

He flinched, moved – was maybe even going to reach for something, a knife or a gun – but then he thought the better of it and just looked around, over his shoulder, probably pissed now at Nestor.

I decided to push it.

‘I thought all you Russians were big shots – you know, tough, in control.’

He looked back, widening his eyes at me in disbelief. Then he collected himself, and for some reason made up his mind to respond.

‘What – I not in control? I turn you down.’

Now I snorted sarcastically.

He paused. Then he snarled, ‘Fuck you. What you know about us anyway?’

‘Quite a bit, actually. I know about Marat Balagula and the gas tax scam, and that deal with the Colombo family. Then there’s… Michael…’ I paused and made a show of trying to get the name out. ‘… Shmushkevich?’

I realized from the look on his face that he wasn’t entirely sure what I was talking about. He would probably only have been a kid when the so-called daisy-chain of dummy oil companies had been in full swing in the ’80s, trucking gas in from South America and forging tax receipts. And anyway who knew what these younger guys talked about when they got together – probably not the great scams of a previous generation, that was for sure.

‘So… what?’ he said. ‘You a cop?’

‘No.’

When I didn’t add anything, he started to get up to leave.

‘Come on, Gennady,’ I said, ‘lighten up, would you?’

He stepped out of the booth and looked down at me, clearly debating in his head whether or not he should kill me right here, or wait until we got outside. I couldn’t believe how reckless I was being, but I somehow felt I was safe, that nothing could touch me.

‘Actually, I’m researching a book on you guys,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for a focus, though – somebody whose point of view I can use to tell the story…’ I held off for a couple of beats, and then went for it. ‘Somebody like you, Gennady.’

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and I knew I had him.

‘What kind of book?’ he said in a surprisingly small voice.

‘A novel,’ I replied. ‘It’s really just taking shape at the moment, but I see it as a story with an epic dimension to it, triumph over adversity, that kind of thing. From the gulags to the…’ I trailed off here, faltering for a moment, aware that I might be losing him. ‘I mean, if you think about it,’ I went on quickly, ‘the guineas have had it all their own way up to now, but that five-families, men-of-honour, badda-bing badda-boom shit has become clichéd. People want something new.’ As he considered what I was saying, I decided to hammer it home, ‘So my agent thinks the movie rights on this will almost certainly be snapped up as well.’

Gennady hesitated for a moment, and then sat back down into the booth, waiting for more.

On the hoof, I managed to outline a vague plot centring on a young second-generation Russian who finds himself moving up through the Organizatsiya. I threw in references to the Sicilians and the Colombians, but with a repeated wave of the hand I also kept deferring, in anticipation, to Gennady’s superior grasp of the details. Managing to flip the axis, I soon had him doing most of the talking – albeit in his fairly mangled English. He agreed with some suggestions I made and dismissed others, but he’d got the whiff of glamour into his system now and couldn’t be stopped.

I hadn’t planned any of this, of course, and as I was doing it I didn’t really believe I’d get away with it either, but the boldest stroke was yet to come. After he’d agreed to do consultancy on ‘the project’ and we’d established a few ground rules, I managed to edge the conversation back around to the loan. I told him my advance on the book had already been spent and that the 75K was a gambling debt I had to pay off – and had to pay off today.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This matter was now a minor distraction to Gennady. He took out his cellphone and had a quick conversation with someone in Russian. Then, still on the phone, he asked me a series of questions. What was my social security number? Driver’s licence number? What were the names of my landlord and my employer? Where did I bank and what credit cards did I hold? I took out my social security card and driver’s licence, and read out the relevant numbers. Then I gave him the names and the other stuff he wanted while he relayed the information in Russian to the person on the other end of the line.

With that taken care of, Gennady put away his phone and got back to talking about the project. Fifteen minutes later his phone rang. As before, he spoke in Russian, at one point covering the mouthpiece with his hand and whispering, ‘That OK, you cleared. So – what? Seventy-five? You sure? You want more? A hundred?’

I paused, and then nodded yes.

When he’d finished on the phone, he said, ‘Will be ready in a half-hour.’

Then he put the phone away and placed his hands down flat on the table.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘so who we going to cast in this thing?’

Half an hour later, on the nose, another young guy arrived. Gennady introduced him as Leo. He was skinny and not unlike Gennady, but he didn’t have Gennady’s eyes, didn’t have what Gennady had – looked, in fact, like he’d had whatever it was Gennady did have surgically removed. Maybe they were brothers, or cousins, and maybe – I started thinking – maybe I could make something out of this. They spoke in Russian for a moment and then Leo pulled a thick brown envelope out of his jacket pocket, put it on the table, slid out of the booth and left without saying a word. Gennady shoved the envelope in my direction.

‘This a knockdown, OK? Short term. Five repayments, five weeks, twenty-two-five a time. I come by your place each…’ He paused, and stared at the envelope for a moment. ‘… each Friday morning, start two weeks from today.’ He held the envelope up in his left hand. ‘This no joke, Eddie – you take this now… you mine.’ I nodded. ‘I go into other stuff?’

I shook my head.

The other stuff being, I presumed – at the very least – legs, knees, arms, ribs, baseball bats, switchblades, electric cattle-prods maybe.

‘No.’ I shook my head again. ‘It’s OK. I understand.’

I was anxious to get away now that I had the cash, but I could hardly appear to be in too much of a hurry. It turned out, however, that Gennady himself had to go, and was already late for another appointment. We’d exchanged phone numbers, so before he left we agreed that in a week or so we’d make some arrangement to meet again. He’d check up on some stuff, and I’d work a little more on shaping – maybe even expanding – the central character of what had somehow mutated, during the course of our conversation, from a novel into a screenplay.

Gennady put on his Ray-Bans and was ready to go. But he paused, and reached over to shake my hand. He did this silently, solemnly.

Then he got up and left.

I called Klondike from the payphone in the diner. I explained the situation and they gave me the address of a bank on Third Avenue where I could deposit cash that would immediately be credited to my account.

I thanked Nestor for his help and then took a cab to Sixty-first and Third. I opened the envelope in the back of the cab and fingered the wads of hundred-dollar bills. I’d never seen this much cash before in my life and I felt dizzy just looking at it. I felt even dizzier handing it over at the bank and watching the teller count it.

After that, I took another cab back to Tenth Street and got settled down to work again. In my absence, the stocks I was holding had increased dramatically in value, bringing my base capital up to $50,000. This meant that with Gennady’s contribution I now had almost $150,000 at my disposal, and with only a couple of hours’ trading time left – and consequently very little time for research – I just jumped right into it, tracking valuations, schlepping stocks around, buying, selling, sprinting back and forth across the various rows of figures on the computer screens.

This process gathered considerable momentum and peaked late in the afternoon with two big scores – let’s call them Y and Z – high-risk, high-yield stocks, each on a rapid upswing. Y carried me as far as the $200,000 mark, and Z carried me considerably beyond it, to just over a quarter of a million. It was a tense, sometimes harrowing few hours, but it gave me a real taste for the thrill of facing down the odds, and also for large quantities of adrenalin, a substance I could almost feel being secreted into, and moving through, my system – almost the way share prices themselves shifted and moved through the markets.

Despite my success rate, however, or maybe because of it, a sense of dissatisfaction began to creep over me. I had the feeling that I could be doing a lot more than just trading at home on my PC, and that being a guerrilla market-maker wasn’t going to be anywhere near enough to keep me happy. The fact is, I wanted to know what it would be like to trade from the inside, and at the highest levels… what it would be like and how it would feel to buy millions of shares at a time…

I phoned Kevin Doyle, therefore – the investment banker I’d gone for breakfast with a few Sundays before – and arranged to meet him for drinks at the Orpheus Room.

The last time we met he’d been very intent on giving me advice about setting up a portfolio of stocks, so I thought I could maybe pick his brains a little and get some tips on how to move into the big league.

Kevin didn’t recognize me at first when he arrived at the bar. He said I’d changed and was considerably slimmer than when we’d met at Herb and Jilly’s.

He wanted to know where I worked out.

I looked at him for a moment. Herb and Jilly’s? Then I realized that whoever Herb and Jilly were, it must have been at their place on the Upper West Side that I’d ended up that night.

‘I don’t work out,’ I said. ‘Working out is the new lunch, it’s for wimps.’

He laughed, and then ordered an Absolut on the rocks.

Kevin Doyle was around forty, forty-two, and fairly trim himself. He was wearing a charcoal suit and a red silk tie. I couldn’t remember much of what I’d told him at Herb and Jilly’s, or afterwards in that diner on Amsterdam Avenue, but one thing I did remember clearly was that I’d done most of the talking, and Kevin – apart from trying to turn me on to some stock tips – had hung on my every word. It’d been that thing again, that wanting-to-impress-me, wanting-to-be-my-best-friend thing that I’d had with Paul Baxter and Artie Meltzer. I tried to analyse what this was, and could only conclude that maybe a combination of my being enthusiastic and non-judgemental – noncompetitive – might have struck some kind of a chord in people, especially in people who were stressed out and on their guard all the time. At any rate, these days I had the talking thing a bit more under control, so I decided to let Kevin take the lead. I asked him about Van Loon and Associates.

‘We’re a small investment bank,’ he began, ‘about two hundred and fifty employees. We do venture capital, fund management, real estate, that kind of thing. We’ve brokered some fairly big entertainment deals recently. We did the MCL-Parnassus purchase of Cableplex last year, and Carl Van Loon himself is currently in talks about something else to Hank Atwood, the Chairman of MCL.’ He paused, and then added, as though telling me he’d just been picked for the soccer team, ‘I’m a managing director.’

But when he elaborated on this a bit, explaining that he was one of seven or eight managing directors in the company who babysat their own deals and then came out with huge commissions, I realized for the first time that Kevin wasn’t just some Wall Street schmoe. From what he was telling me, I quickly reckoned that he probably cleared about two or three million a year.

Now I was impressed.

‘What about Van Loon? Is he…’ I asked, not even having a real question here, obviously succumbing a little to the magnetic pull of celebrity that still surrounded Kevin’s boss.

‘Carl’s all right. He’s mellowed a lot, you know. Over the years. But he still works as hard as ever.’

I nodded, thinking How hard could that be?

‘The firm wouldn’t be what it is today without him.’

This was a man who probably cleared about two or three million a week.

‘Hhn.’

‘So… how have you been?’

‘Me? Fine.’

I didn’t remember much of our previous encounter, but I was pretty sure I’d mentioned my book, and probably without saying that it was part of a cheesy series for a second-rate publisher – so, at least as far as I knew, Kevin thought I was a writer of some kind, a commentator, someone with their finger, so to speak, on the pulse of the Zeitgeist… someone he could have an intelligent, self-congratulatory but non-threatening conversation with, and about stuff like the new economy and megatrends and digitalization.

But I got to the point fairly fast.

‘What do you make of all this electronic day-trading, Kevin?’

He thought for a second. ‘It’s just noise. These guys aren’t speculators, or even investors, they’re gamblers – or else sorry geeks who think they’ve democtratized the markets.’ He made a face. ‘When this bubble pops, let me tell you, there’s going to be a lot of blood spattered on the walls.’

He took a sip from his drink.

I lifted my glass. ‘I’ve been doing it at home on my PC, using a software trading package I bought on Forty-seventh Street. I’m up about a quarter of a million in two days.’

Kevin looked at me in horror for a few seconds, taking in the information. But he was also confused, and obviously didn’t know what to say. Then it registered.

‘A quarter of a million?’

‘Hmm.’

‘In two days? That’s pretty good.’

‘Yeah, I think so. But I find I’m weirdly – how can I put this? – dissatisfied with it. I feel constricted. I need to expand.’

As he tried to come to terms with what I was telling him, Kevin shifted on his stool and maybe even squirmed a little. He was a confident guy, clearly very successful, and it was odd to see him mired in uncertainty like this.

‘Ehm… perhaps…’ he scratched his nose, ‘you could… why don’t you try one of those day-trading firms?’

I asked him what difference that would make.

‘Well, you’re not isolated, you’re in a room with a bunch of other traders and on the principle that no one in an environment like that wants to see anyone else failing, you help each other out, and share information. Most firms also offer high leverage, anywhere between five to ten times your deposit. You get a better feel for the behaviour of the markets, as well,’ – he was getting back into his stride here – ‘because it’s often just a question of being able to gauge the collective mood, and then deciding either to go with it or… I don’t know’ – he shrugged his shoulders – ‘against it.’

I asked him if he could recommend one of these places.

‘There are a couple of good ones I’ve heard about – actually on, or at least around, Wall Street itself. Though if you ask me, Eddie, it sounds like you’re doing pretty good on your own.’

I wrote down the names he reeled off and thanked him anyway. Then we each took sips from our respective glasses.

‘So… a quarter of a million in two days.’ He whistled in admiration. ‘What’s your strategy?’

I was about to give him an edited version of events when two guys in suits came up behind us and one of them slapped Kevin on the back. ‘Hey Doyle, you old dog, what’s happening?’

These were money-scented financial-sector jocks, and when Kevin introduced me but didn’t say that I was a managing director or an executive vice-president with this or that outfit, they more or less ignored me. During the ensuing conversation about the emerging markets of Latin America, and then about the tech stocks bubble, I could see Kevin struggling with his fear that I was going to start talking again about day-trading on a PC – and in front of these guys. So when I stood up to go, I think he was a little relieved.

I told him I’d phone him in a few days’ time and let him know how I’d gotten on with that thing we’d been discussing.

Lafayette Trading was on Broad Street, just a few blocks down from the New York Stock Exchange. In the main room of a sparsely furnished suite of offices on the fourth floor, twenty tables were arranged in a large rectangle. Each table held enough terminals and PCs for at least three traders, and of the fifty or so traders I saw there on my first morning – all male, each seated in comfortable executive-style chairs – I’d say more than half of them were under thirty years old, and of those about half again were wearing jeans and baseball caps.

The deal was that you put down a minimum deposit of $25,000 and Lafayette then provided all the hardware and software you needed in order to trade. In return for this, they charged a commission of two cents a share on each trade you made. If you wanted it, and most people did, they also offered pretty high leverage on your deposit. I registered with them, paying a deposit of $200,000 and then arranged to leverage myself to two and a half times that amount – which meant, effectively, that I was starting off this new phase of my trading career with half a million dollars at my disposal.

I had to do a short induction course in the morning. Then I spent most of the early afternoon chatting to some of the other traders and more or less observing the room. The atmosphere at Lafayette was – as Kevin had said it might be in such a place – friendly and collaborative. There was a sense of us all being in this together, of us all working against the big marketmakers down the street. But it didn’t take long to see that there were factions in the room, and some big personalities, and that the dynamics weren’t always going to be so easy to read. There were different trading styles, as well, of course. The guy to my left, for example, was a manic keyboard-crusher who didn’t seem to do any research or analysis.

‘What’s that stock?’ I asked him, pointing to a symbol on his screen soon after I’d sat down.

‘No idea,’ he mumbled, not taking his eyes off what he was doing, ‘it has a big spread and it’s moving, and that’s all I need to know.’

Other traders seemed more cautious and did quite a lot of research – by watching the TV sets bolted to the side-wall, or by running from their tables to a Bloomberg terminal at the top of the room, or just by poring over endless stock graphs on their own screens. In any case, when I felt I had the measure of the room, and its mood, I went to work at my allotted table-space, looking for some likely trades myself. But as it was my first day I took it fairly easy and when I closed out my positions before the final bell I was only about $5,000 up. Given my admittedly short track record, this didn’t seem like all that much to me, but some of the other traders didn’t agree. Clearly, as the new kid on the block, I had already aroused a certain amount of curiosity, not to say suspicion, in the room. Someone asked me rather tentatively if I wanted to join a group of them who were going for a drink to some place down at Pier 17 Pavilion, but I declined. I didn’t want to form any new alliances just yet.

It had been a relatively slow day for me – at least in terms of mental activity and the amount of work I’d done – so when I got home I was feeling pretty restless, even a little frenzied. Unable to sleep that night, I stayed on the couch in the living-room, watching TV and reading. Against a background of cable movies, quiz shows and commercials, I ploughed through the financial sections of the day’s papers, a biography of Warren Buffet and all the text, captions, advertising copy, mastheads and photo credits of half a dozen glossy business magazines.

On my second morning at Lafayette, a Tuesday, I spent a good deal of time nosing around the various financial websites. I eventually opened up more than a dozen major positions, eighty thousand shares in total, and then concentrated on tracking them carefully.

At about eleven-thirty, there was a slight commotion to my left. A few tables up, three of the guys in baseball caps, who appeared to be working very closely together, started punching the air and hissing yessss to each other. It took another few minutes for the ‘tip’ to filter down. The keyboard-cruncher beside me, whose name was Jay, pulled himself away from his screen for a brief moment and turned to face me.

‘Think something’s just come through on the wire about some biotech stock.’

He shrugged his shoulders and then went back to work, but the guy beside him wheeled his chair around and spoke to me as though we’d known each other since high school.

‘Medical breakthrough, hasn’t been announced yet. MEDX – that’s Mediflux Inc., a Florida drug company, yeah? – seems they’ve got some anti-cancer protein in development. It’s got the white-coats over at the National Cancer Research Foundation all excited.’

‘And?’

He looked at me as if to say, What – are you a moron? Then, pausing uncertainly, he said, ‘Buy Mediflux!’

I could see that Jay, the guy beside me, was already doing just that. I nodded at the other guy and then went back to my screen to see what information might be available about this pharmaceutical company – Mediflux Inc. It was currently selling at 43⅓, having moved up from an opening price of 37¾. Everyone was assuming it was going to continue this upward trend, and everyone – at least everyone in the room around me – seemed to be buying Mediflux on that basis. I spent a while looking at its fundamentals – historical earnings, growth potential, that kind of thing – and at one point during this Jay nudged me and said, ‘How much did you buy?’

I looked at him and paused, quickly reviewing in my head everything I’d just read about Mediflux.

‘I didn’t buy any,’ I said. ‘In fact, I’m going to sell it short.’

This meant that, contrary to the prevailing wisdom in the room, I expected the Mediflux share price to fall. While they were all busy buying it, I would borrow Mediflux stock from my broker. I would then sell it, having committed to buying it back later at what I hoped would be a considerably lower price. The lower the price, of course, the greater the profit for me.

‘You’re going to short it?’

He said this quite loudly, and as the word short darted its way around the tables like an acute pain along a sciatic nerve, you could almost feel the whole room stiffen. There was a brief silence and then everyone started talking at the same time and checking their screens and looking across at my table. Over the next couple of minutes the tension in the room increased as the original Mediflux faction regrouped and began hurling comments in my direction.

‘Feel sorry for you, buddy.’

‘Margin call!’

‘Loser!’

I ignored these taunts and got on with executing my short-sell strategy on Mediflux, as well as looking after my other positions. For the next while the Mediflux share price continued to rise, reaching 51 points, but then it seemed to stabilize. Jay nudged me again and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, Talk to me, why did you short it?

‘Because it’s all hype,’ I said. ‘What – a couple of mice with cancer in some laboratory somewhere sit up in bed and ask for tea and suddenly we’re all into a buying frenzy?’ I shook my head. ‘And when is this new protein they’re developing going to have a commercial application anyway? Five years? Ten years?’

Jay looked worried all of a sudden and seemed to recoil into himself.

‘Besides,’ I said, pointing at my screen, ‘Eiben-Chemcorp pulled out of a takeover deal of Mediflux about six months ago, and it was never properly explained – doesn’t anyone want to remember that?’

I could see him rapidly processing the information.

‘This does not have legs, Jay.’

He turned to the other guy beside him and started whispering. Soon – as my analysis made its way around to all of the other traders – dark clouds of uncertainty descended on the room.

From the babble of muttering and clicking that ensued, it was obvious that two camps were emerging – some of the traders were going to hold on to their stock, while others were going to join me in shorting Mediflux. Jay, and the guy beside him, reversed their positions. The baseball caps held fast to theirs, but refrained from making any comments about it – not aloud, at any rate. I remained huddled over my terminal, keeping a low profile, even though the atmosphere was electric, with a definite sense that in the ecosystem of the room I was an interloper who was making some kind of a bid for power. I hadn’t intended it that way, of course, but the thing is, I was convinced that MEDX was a turkey – and so it was to prove.

Late in the afternoon, just as I had predicted, the stock collapsed. It started slipping at about 3.15 p.m., much to the consternation of about two thirds of the traders in the room. MEDX closed at 17½ points, a drop of 36½ points from its high, earlier in the day, of 54.

At the closing bell, a cheer went up from a small group sitting at the table directly opposite me. They came over afterwards to introduce themselves – and I realized that with them, Jay, the guy beside him, and one or two others, I had formed my own crew. It wasn’t only because they were happy to have taken the tip from me, but it was also, I think, because of what they saw as the sheer, ballsy scale of my own trade. I had shorted 5,000 MEDX shares and come away with over $180,000. This was more in one trade than most of them could hope to make in a year, and they loved it – loved the sanction it gave to risk, loved how it confirmed that scoring big was possible.

One of the three baseball caps nodded at me from across the room, a gesture that I think was meant to indicate he was conceding defeat, but then he left quickly with the other two and I didn’t get a chance to say to him – magnanimously, or, perhaps, patronizingly – that hey, they had come up with the stock in the first place. I still refused to go for a drink with anyone, but I did stick around for ages, chatting and trying to find out as much as I could about how day-trading firms like this one operated.

On my third morning at Lafayette I was the centre of attention. But I was also, undeniably, on trial. Was I a one-hit wonder – I’m sure they were all thinking – or did I actually know what the fuck I was doing?

As it turned out my period of probation only lasted a few hours. A position with a data-storage company, JKLS – not unlike the one of the previous day – soon presented itself, and I whispered to Jay that I was about to initiate coverage of the stock at its current price with an immediate short-sell. Jay, who had quietly assumed the role of my underboss, passed on this information to the next table up, and within less than a minute it seemed that the whole room was shorting JKLS. During the course of the morning, I fed out a few other tips that some people, but certainly not everyone, picked up on. Early in the afternoon, however, when the JKLS price began falling rapidly, and a cheer went up, a quick review of my other tips took place, and the doubters joined in.

By the closing bell at four o’clock, it was my room.

Over the next couple of days, the trading ‘pit’ at Lafayette was packed to capacity – with all of the regulars in attendance, as well as quite a few new faces. I stuck to my short-selling strategy and led an onslaught against a whole series of overhyped and overvalued stocks. My instinct for identifying these stocks appeared to be unerring and it was thrilling to watch them all behave exactly as I had predicted. In turn, people were watching me very closely and naturally wanted to know how I was doing it, but since these same people were also making a lot of money from my recommendations, no one had the temerity to come out straight and simply ask me. Which was just as well, because I wouldn’t really have had an answer.

It did seem to me to be instinct, though – but informed instinct, instinct based on a huge amount of research, which of course, thanks to MDT-48, was conducted more rapidly and comprehensively than anyone at Lafayette would ever realize.

But that also wasn’t enough to explain it – because there were plenty of well-resourced, well-financed research departments around, from the windowless backrooms of investment banks and brokerage houses throughout the country, stuffed full of pale, nameless ‘quants’ number-crunching till dawn, to places stuffed full of Nobel-prize winning mathematicians and economists, places like the Santa Fe Institute and MIT. For an individual, I was processing a huge amount of information – it was true – but I still couldn’t compete with outfits like those.

So what was it?

After the first day of my second week at Lafayette, I tried to evaluate the various possibilities – maybe it was superior information, or heightened instinct, or brain chemistry, or some kind of mysterious synergy between the organic and the technological – but as I sat there at my table, staring vacantly at the screen, these ruminations slowly coalesced into an overwhelming vision of the vastness and beauty of the stock market itself. Grappling for understanding, I soon realized that despite its susceptibility to predictable metaphor – it was an ocean, a celestial firmament, a numerical representation of the will of God – the stock market was nevertheless something more than just a market for stocks. In its complexity and ceaseless motion the twenty-four-hour global network of trading systems was nothing less than a template for human consciousness, with the electronic marketplace perhaps forming humanity’s first tentative version of a collective nervous system, a global brain. Moreover, whatever interactive combination of wires and microchips and circuits and cells and receptors and synapses was required to achieve this grand convergence of band-width and brain-tissue, it seemed to me in that moment that I had tumbled upon it – I was jacked in and booted up… my mind was a living fractal, a mirrored part of the greater functioning whole.

I was also aware – not to lose the run of myself here – that whenever an individual is on the receiving end of a revelation like this, addressed to himself alone (and written out, say, on the night sky, as Nathaniel Hawthorne would have it), the revelation can only be the result of a morbid and disordered state of mind, but surely this was somehow different, surely this was empirical, demonstrable – after all, at the end of my sixth day of trading at Lafayette, I had an unbroken chain of winners and over a million dollars in my brokerage account.

That evening I went for a drink with Jay and a few of the others to a place on Fulton Street. After my third beer and half a dozen cigarettes, not to mention a torrent of day-trading lore from my new colleagues, I resolved to set a few things in train – changes that I felt it was now time to make. I resolved to put a deposit down on an apartment – somewhere bigger than my place on Tenth Street, and in a different part of town, maybe Gramercy Park, or even Brooklyn Heights. I also resolved to throw out all my old clothes and furniture and accumulated stuff, and only replace what I absolutely needed. Most important, however, I resolved to move on from day-trading and into a wider playing field, to move up to money management maybe, or hedge funds or global markets.

I’d only been trading for little over a week, so naturally I didn’t have much idea about how I was going to pull something like this off, but when I got back to my apartment, as though on cue, there was a message from Kevin Doyle on my answering machine.

Click.

Beeep.

‘Hi Eddie, Kevin – what is all this stuff I’ve been hearing? Call me.’

Without even taking my jacket off, I picked up the phone and dialled his number.

‘Hello.’

‘So what have you been hearing?’

Beat.

‘Lafayette, Eddie. Everyone’s talking about you.’

‘About me?’

‘Yeah. I happened to be having lunch with Carl and a few other people today when someone mentioned they’d heard rumours about a day-trading firm on Broad Street – and some trader there who was performing phenomenally. I made a few enquiries after lunch and your name came up.’

I smiled to myself and said, ‘Oh yeah?’

‘And Eddie, that’s not all. I was speaking to Carl again later and I told him what I’d found out. He was really interested, and when I said you were actually a friend of mine he said he’d like to meet you.’

‘That’s great, Kevin. I’d like to meet him. Any time that suits.’

‘Are you free tomorrow night?’

‘Yeah.’

He paused. ‘Let me call you back.’

He rang off immediately.

I went over and sat on the couch and looked around. I was going to be getting out of here soon – and not a moment too soon, either. I envisaged the spacious, elegantly decorated living-room of a house in Brooklyn Heights. I saw myself standing at a bay window, looking out on to one of those tree-lined streets that Melissa and I, on our way from Carroll Gardens into the city, on summer days, had often walked along, and even talked about one day living on. Cranberry Street. Orange Street. Pineapple Street.

The phone rang again. I stood up and walked across the room to answer it.

‘Eddie – Kevin. Drinks tomorrow night? At the Orpheus Room?’

‘Great. What time?’

‘Eight. But why don’t you and I meet at seven-thirty, that way I can fill you in on some stuff.’

‘Sure.’

I put the phone down.

As I stood there, with my hand still on the receiver, I began to feel light-headed and dizzy, and everything went dark for a second. Then, without consciously registering that I had moved – and moved to the other side of the room – I suddenly found myself reaching out to the edge of the couch for something to lean against.

It was only then that I realized I hadn’t eaten anything in three days.

12

I ARRIVED AT THE ORPHEUS ROOM before Kevin and took a seat at the bar. I ordered a club soda.

I didn’t know what I expected from this meeting, but it would certainly be interesting. Carl Van Loon was one of those names I’d seen in newspapers and magazines all throughout the 1980s, a name synonymous with that decade and its celebrated devotion to Greed. He might be quiet and retiring these days, but back then the chairman of Van Loon & Associates had been involved in several notorious property deals, including the construction of a gigantic and controversial office building in Manhattan. He had also been involved in some of the highest-profile leveraged buyouts of the period, and in countless mergers and acquisitions.

Back in those days, as well, Van Loon and his second wife, interior-designer Gabby De Paganis, had been denizens of the black-tie charity circuit and had had their pictures in the social pages of every issue of New York magazine and Quest and Town and Country. To me, he’d been a member of that gallery of cartoon characters – along with people like Al Sharpton, Leona Helmsley and John Gotti – that had made up the public life of the times, the public life we’d all consumed so voraciously on a daily basis, and then discussed and dissected at the slightest provocation.

I remember once being in the West Village with Melissa, for instance, about 1985 or 1986 – in Caffe Vivaldi – when she got up on her high horse about the proposed Van Loon Building. Van Loon had long wanted to regain the title of World’s Tallest for New York, and was proposing a glass box on the site of the old St Nicholas Hotel on Forty-eighth Street. It had been designed at over fifteen hundred feet, but after endless objections was eventually built at just under a thousand. ‘What is this shit with skyscrapers?’ she’d said, holding up her espresso cup, ‘I mean, haven’t we gotten over it yet?’ OK, the skyscraper had once been the supreme symbol of corporate capitalism, indeed of America itself – what Ayn Rand referring to the Woolworth Building as seen from New York Harbour had called ‘the finger of God’ – but surely we no longer needed it, no longer needed people like Carl Van Loon coming along trying to imprint their adolescent fantasies on the city skyline. For the most part, in any case – she went on – the question of height had been irrelevant, a red herring, as skyscrapers had merely been commercial billboards for the likes of sewing-machine companies and retailers and car manufacturers and newspapers. So what was this one going to be? A billboard for fucking junk bonds? Jesus.

Melissa, on occasions such as this, had wielded her espresso cup with a rare elegance – suitably indignant, but never spilling a drop, and always ready if necessary to flip the axis and start laughing at herself.

‘Eddie.’

She always calmed down in the same way, too – no matter how animated she’d become. She would lean her head slightly forward, maybe swirling whatever coffee was left in the cup, and go still and quiet, diaphanous strands of hair settling gently across her face.

‘Eddie?’

I turned around in my seat, away from the bar. Kevin was standing there, staring at me.

I held out my hand.

‘Kevin.’

‘Eddie.’

‘How are you?’

‘Fine.’

As we shook hands, I tried to edge that image of Melissa from my mind. I asked him if he wanted a drink – an Absolut on the rocks – and he did. A few minutes of small talk followed, and then Kevin started priming me for the meeting with Van Loon.

‘He’s… mercurial – one day he’s your best friend and the next he’ll look right through you, so don’t be put off if he’s a little weird.’

I nodded.

‘Oh, and – I’m sure I don’t have to tell you this – but… don’t pause or hesitate when you’re answering him, he hates that.’

I nodded again.

‘You see, he’s really caught up at the moment in this MCL-Parnassus thing with Hank Atwood and… I don’t know.’

One of the largest media conglomerates in the world, with cable, film studio and publishing divisions, MCL-Parnassus was the kind of company that business journalists liked to describe as ‘a megalith’ or ‘a behemoth’.

‘What’s going on with Atwood?’ I asked.

‘I’m not sure exactly, it’s all still under wraps.’ Then something occurred to him. ‘And don’t ask him - whatever you do.’

I could see that Kevin was having second thoughts about setting this thing up. He kept looking at his watch, as if he were working to a deadline and time was running out. He drained the last of the vodka from his glass at about ten to eight, ordered another one, and then said, ‘So, Eddie, just what exactly are you going to be telling him?’

‘I don’t know,’ I answered, shrugging my shoulders, ‘I suppose I’ll tell him about my adventures in day-trading, and give him a run-down of all the major positions I’ve held.’

Kevin seemed to be expecting something more than this – but what? Since I couldn’t offer him any satisfactory explanation for my success-rate, other than to refer to some inexplicable ability I seemed to have developed, all I ended up saying was, ‘I’ve been lucky, Kevin. I mean – don’t get me wrong – I’ve worked at it, and I do a lot of research, but… yeah, things have gone my way.’

As far as Kevin was concerned, however, this kind of ill-defined bullshit clearly wasn’t going to be enough – even if he couldn’t bring himself to say as much out loud. It was then I realized that there was an underlying anxiety in everything he had been saying up to that point, a fear that unless he had some inside track on my trading strategy, and consequently some leverage with Van Loon, he was just going to end up handing me over to Van Loon – and that then, effectively, he would be out of the picture.

But there wasn’t much I could do about that.

For my part, I felt pretty good. I’d eaten a plate of pasta in bianco after my disturbing spell of dizziness the previous evening. Then I’d taken some vitamin pills and diet supplements and gone to bed. I’d slept for about six hours, which was as much, if not more, than I’d managed in a month. I was still on two doses of MDT a day, but I now felt fresher and more in control – and more confident – than ever before.

Van Loon swept into the Orpheus Room as though he were being filmed in an elaborate tracking shot and this was just the last stage in a sequence that had taken him all the way from his limousine outside on the street. Tall, lean and a bit stooped, Van Loon was still quite an imposing figure. He was sixtyish and tanned, and the few wisps of hair he had left were a distinguished silvery-white. He shook my hand vigorously and then invited us both to join him over at his regular table in the corner.

I hadn’t seen him ordering anything or even making eye contact with the barman, but a couple of seconds after we’d sat down – me with my club soda and Kevin with his Absolut – Van Loon was served what looked like the perfect Martini. The waiter arrived, placed the glass down on the table and withdrew, all with a lightness of touch – silence and near invisibility – that was clearly reserved by management for a certain… class of customer.

‘So, Eddie Spinola,’ Van Loon said, looking me directly in the eyes, ‘what’s your secret?’

I could feel Kevin stiffen beside me.

‘Medication,’ I said at once, ‘I’m on special medication.’

Van Loon laughed at this. Then he picked up his Martini, raised it to me and said, ‘Well, I hope it’s a repeat prescription.’

This time I laughed, and raised my club soda to him.

But that was it. He didn’t pursue the matter any further. To Kevin’s obvious annoyance, Van Loon then went on to talk about his new Gulfstream V, and the problems he’d been having with it, and how he’d spent sixteen months on a waiting list just to get the damned thing. He addressed all of these remarks directly to me, and I got the impression – because it was too pointed to be accidental – that he was deliberately excluding Kevin. I took it for granted, therefore, that we wouldn’t be going back to the subject of what my ‘secret’ might be, and we – or rather Van Loon – simply talked about other things… cigars, for example, and how he’d recently tried to buy JFK’s humidor, unsuccessfully as it had turned out. Or cars – his latest being a Maserati that had set him back nearly ‘two hundred large’.

Van Loon was brash and vulgar and conformed almost exactly to how I would have imagined him from his public profile of a decade before, but the strange thing was I liked him. There was a certain appeal in the way he focused so intently on money and on various imaginative, flamboyant ways of spending it. With Kevin, on the other hand, the emphasis seemed to be solely on ways of making it, and when a friend of Van Loon’s joined us a while later from another table, Kevin – true to form – succeeded in veering the conversation around to the subject of the markets. Van Loon’s friend was Frank Pierce, a fellow veteran from the 1980s who had worked for Goldman Sachs and was now running a private investment fund. None too subtly, Kevin mentioned something about using mathematics and advanced software programs to beat the markets.

I said nothing.

Frank Pierce, who was quite chubby and had beady eyes, said, ‘Horseshit. If it could be done, you think someone wouldn’t have done it by now?’ He looked around, and then added, ‘I mean, we all do quantitative analysis, we all do the math, but they’ve been going on about this other stuff for years, this black-box stuff, and it’s crap. It’s like trying to turn base metals into gold, it can’t be done, you can’t beat the markets – but there’ll always be some jerk with too many college degrees and a pony-tail who thinks you can.’

‘With respect,’ Kevin said, addressing himself to Frank Pierce, but obviously trying to draw me out at the same time, ‘there are some examples around of people who have beaten the markets, or appear to have.’

‘Beaten the markets how?’

Kevin glanced over in my direction, but I wasn’t going to rise to the bait. He was on his own.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘we haven’t always had the technology we have now, we haven’t always had the capacity to process such huge amounts of information. If you analyse enough data, patterns will emerge, and certain of those patterns just may have predictive value.’

‘Horseshit,’ Frank Pierce boomed again.

Kevin was a little taken aback at this, but he soldiered on. ‘I mean, by using complex systems and time-series analysis you can… you can identify pockets of probability. Then you patch these together into some mechanism for pattern-recognition…’ – he paused here, less sure of himself now, but also in too deep to stop – ‘… and from there you build a model to predict market trends.’

He looked over at me imploringly, as if to say Eddie, please, am I on the right track here? Is this how you’re doing it?

‘Patterns my ass,’ said Pierce. ‘How do you think we made our money?’ He leant his weight forward in the chair and with his stubby index finger rapidly identified himself and Van Loon. ‘Huh?’ Then he pointed to his right temple, tapped it slowly, and said, ‘Un-der-standing. That’s how. Understanding how business works. Under standing when a company is overvalued, or undervalued. Under standing that you never make a bet you can’t afford to lose.’

Van Loon turned to me, like a chat-show host, and said, ‘Eddie?’

‘Absolutely,’ I said in a quiet voice, ‘no one could argue with that…’

‘But?’ Pierce snorted sarcastically. ‘There’s always a but with these guys.’

‘Yes,’ I went on, sensing Kevin’s obvious relief that I had deigned to speak, ‘there is a but. It’s a question of velocity’ – I had no idea what was coming next – ‘because… well, there’s no time for human judgement anymore. You see a chance, you blink and it’s gone. We are entering the age of decentralized, online decision-making, with the decisions being made by millions – and potentially hundreds of millions – of individual investors all around the world, people who have the ability to shift huge amounts of money around in less time than it takes to sneeze, but without consulting each other. So, understanding doesn’t come into it – or, if it does, it’s not understanding how companies work, it’s understanding how mass psychology works.’

Pierce waved a hand through the air. ‘What – you think you can tell me why the markets boom or crash? Why today, let’s say? And not tomorrow, not yesterday?’

‘No, I can’t. But these are legitimate questions. Why should data cluster in predictable patterns? Why should there be a structure to the financial markets?’ I paused, waiting for someone to say something, but when no one did I went on, ‘because the markets are the product of human activity, and humans follow trends – it’s that simple.’

Kevin had gone pale by this stage.

‘And of course the trends are usually the same… one, aversion to risk, and two, follow the herd.’

‘Pah,’ said Pierce.

But he left it at that. He muttered something to Van Loon that I didn’t catch, and then looked at his watch. Kevin remained motionless, staring down at the carpet, almost in despair now. Is that it, he seemed to be thinking, human fucking nature? How am I supposed to turn that to my advantage?

What I was feeling, on the other hand, was acute embarrassment. I hadn’t wanted to say anything in the first place, but I could hardly have ignored Van Loon’s invitation to contribute. So what happens? I speak and end up being a patronizing asshole. Understanding doesn’t come into it? Where did I get off lecturing two billionaires about how to make money?

After a couple of minutes, in any case, Frank Pierce muttered his excuses and left without saying goodbye to either Kevin or myself.

Van Loon then seemed happy enough to let the conversation drift on for a while. We discussed Mexico and the probable effects the government’s apparently irrational stance was going to have on the markets. At one point, still fairly agitated, I caught myself reeling off a comparative list of per capita GDP figures for 1960 and 1995, stuff I must have read somewhere, but Van Loon cut me short and more or less implied that I was being shrill. He also contradicted a few things I said and was clearly right in each case to do so. I saw him looking at me once or twice, too – strangely – as if he were on the point of calling security over to have me ejected from the building.

But then, a bit later, when Kevin had gone to the bathroom, Van Loon turned to me and said, ‘I think it’s time we got rid of this clown.’ He indicated back to where the bathrooms were, and shrugged his shoulders. ‘Kevin’s a great guy, don’t misunderstand me. He’s an excellent negotiator. But sometimes. Jesus.’

Van Loon looked at me, seeking confirmation that I agreed with him.

I half smiled, unsure of how to react.

So here it came again, that thing, that anxious, needy response I’d somehow triggered in all of the others – in Paul Baxter and Artie Meltzer and Kevin Doyle.

‘Come on, Eddie, drink up. I live five blocks from here. We’re going back to my place for dinner.’

As the three of us were walking out of the Orpheus Room, I was vaguely aware that no one had paid the check or signed anything or even nodded to anyone. But then something occurred to me. Carl Van Loon owned the Orpheus Room, in fact owned the entire building – an anonymous steel-and-glass tube on Fifty-fourth between Park and Lexington. I remembered reading about it when the place had first opened a few years before.

Out on the street, Van Loon summarily dismissed Kevin by telling him that he’d see him in the morning. Kevin hesitated, but then said, ‘Sure, Carl. See you in the morning.’

We made eye contact for a second but both of us pulled away in embarrassment. Then Kevin was gone and Van Loon and I were walking along Fifty-fourth Street towards Park Avenue. He hadn’t had a limousine waiting after all, and then I remembered reading something else, an article in a magazine about how Van Loon often made a big thing of walking – and especially walking in his ‘quarter’, as though that somehow meant he was a man of the people.

We got to his building on Park Avenue. The brief trip from the lobby up to his apartment was indeed just that, a trip, with all of the elements in place: the uniformed doorman, the swirling turquoise marble, the mahogany panels, the brass radiator-grills. I was surprised by how small the elevator-car was, but its interior was very plush and intimate, and I imagined that such a combination could give the experience of being in it, and the accompanying sensation of motion – if you were with the right person – a certain erotic charge. It seemed to me that rich people didn’t think up things like this, and then decide to have them – things like this, little serendipitous accidents of luxury, just happened if you happened to have money.

The apartment was on the fourth floor, but the first thing that caught your attention as you stepped into the main hall was a marble staircase sweeping majestically up to what had to be the fifth floor. The ceilings were very high, and decorated with elaborate plaster-work, and there were friezes around the edges which took your eyes gradually downwards to the large, gilt-framed paintings on the walls.

If the elevator-car was the confessional box, the apartment itself was the whole cathedral.

Van Loon led me across the hallway and into what he called ‘the library’, which is exactly what it was – a dark, book-lined room with Persian rugs, an enormous marble fire-place and several red leather couches. There were also lots of expensive-looking ‘pieces’ of fine French furniture about the place – walnut tables you wouldn’t ever put anything on and delicate little chairs you wouldn’t ever sit in.

‘Hi, Daddy.’

Van Loon looked around, slightly puzzled. He obviously hadn’t expected anybody to be in here. On the far side of the room, barely visible against a wall of leather-bound books, there was a young woman holding open a large volume in her two hands.

‘Oh,’ Van Loon said, and then cleared his throat. ‘Say hello to Mr Spinola, darling.’

‘Hello Mr Spinola, darling.’

The voice was quiet but assured.

Van Loon clicked his tongue in disapproval.

‘Ginny.’

I felt like saying to Van Loon, That’s OK, I don’t mind your daughter calling me ‘darling’. In fact, I kind of like it.

My second erotic charge of the evening had come from Virginia Van Loon, Carl’s nineteen-year-old daughter. In her younger and more vulnerable years, ‘Ginny’ had spent quite a bit of time on the front pages of the daily tabloids for substance abuse and poor taste in boyfriends. She was Van Loon’s only child by his second wife, and had quickly been brought to heel by threats of disinheritance. Or so the story had gone.

‘Look, Ginny,’ Van Loon said, ‘I’ve got to go and get something from my office, so I want you to entertain Mr Spinola here while I’m gone, OK?’

‘Of course, Daddy.’

Van Loon turned to me and said, ‘There are some files I want you to have a look at.’

I nodded at him, not having a clue what he was talking about. Then he disappeared and I was left standing there, peering across the dimness of the room at his daughter.

‘What are you reading?’ I said, trying not to remember the last time I’d asked someone that question.

‘Not reading exactly, I’m looking something up in one of these books Daddy bought by the yard when he moved in here.’

I edged over to the centre of the room in order to be able to see her more clearly. She had short, spiky blonde hair and was wearing trainers, jeans and a pink sleeveless top that left her midriff exposed. She’d had her belly-button pierced and was sporting a tiny gold hoop that glistened occasionally in the light as she moved.

‘What are you looking up?’

She leant back against the bookcase with studied abandon, but the effect was spoilt somewhat by the fact that she was struggling to keep the enormous tome open, and balanced, in her hands.

‘The etymology of the word ferocious.’

‘I see.’

‘Yeah, my mother’s just told me that I have a ferocious temper, and I do – so, I don’t know, to cool down I thought I’d come in here and check out this dictionary of etymology.’ She hiked the book up for a second, as though displaying it as an exhibit in a court room. ‘It’s a strange word, don’t you think? Ferocious.’

‘Have you found it yet?’ I nodded at the dictionary.

‘No, I got distracted by feckless.’

‘Ferocious literally means “wild-eyed”,’ I said, moving around the biggest of the red leather couches in order to get even closer to her. ‘It comes from a combination of the Latin word ferus, which means “fierce” or “wild”, and the particle oc-, which means “looking” or “appearing”.’

Ginny Van Loon stared at me for a second and then slammed the book closed with a loud thwack.

‘Not bad, Mr Spinola, not bad,’ she said, trying to suppress a grin. Then, as she struggled to get the dictionary back into its place on the shelf behind her, she said, ‘You’re not one of Daddy’s business guys, are you?’

I thought about this for a second before answering. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I am. We’ll see.’

She turned around again to face me and in the brief silence that followed I was aware of her eyeing me up and down. I became uncomfortable all of a sudden and wished that I’d gotten around to buying another suit. I’d been wearing this one every day for quite some time now and had begun to feel a bit self-conscious in it.

‘Yeah, but you’re not one of his regular guys?’ She paused. ‘And you don’t…’

‘What?’

‘You don’t look too comfortable… dressed like that.’

I looked down at my suit and tried to think of something to say about it. I couldn’t.

‘So what do you do for Daddy? What service do you provide?’

‘Who says I provide a service?’

‘Carl Van Loon doesn’t have friends, Mr Spinola, he has people who do things for him. What do you do?’

None of this – strangely enough – came across as snotty or obnoxious. For a girl of nineteen, she was breathtakingly self-possessed, and I felt compelled simply to tell her the truth.

‘I’m a stock-market trader, and I’ve been very successful recently. So I’m here – I think – to provide your father with some… advice.’

She raised her eyebrows, opened her arms and did a little curtsey, as if to say voilá.

I smiled.

She reverted to leaning back against the bookcase behind her, and said, ‘I don’t like the stock market.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Because it’s so profoundly uninteresting a thing to have taken over so many people’s lives.’

I raised my eyebrows.

‘I mean, people don’t have drug-dealers any more, or psychoanalysts – they have brokers. At least with getting high or being in analysis, it was about you – you were the subject, to be mangled or untangled or whatever – but playing the markets is like surrendering yourself to this vast, impersonal system. It just generates and then feeds off… greed…’

‘I-’

‘… and it’s not as if it’s your own individual greed either, it’s the same greed as everyone else’s. You ever been to Vegas, Mr Spinola? Ever seen those big rooms with the rows and rows of slot machines? Acres of them? I think the stock market today is like that – all these sad, desperate people planted in front of machines just dreaming of the big score they’re going to make.’

‘Surely that’s easy for you to say.’

‘Maybe so, but it doesn’t make it any less true.’

As I was trying to formulate an answer to this, the door opened behind me and Van Loon came back into the room.

‘Well, Eddie, did she keep you entertained?’

He walked briskly over to a coffee table in front of one of the couches and threw a thick folder of papers on to it.

‘Yes,’ I said, and immediately turned back to look at her. I tried to think of something to say. ‘So, what are you doing, I mean… these days?’

‘These days.’ She smiled. ‘Very diplomatic. Well, these days I suppose I’m a… recovering celebrity?’

‘OK, sweetheart,’ Van Loon said, ‘enough. Skedaddle. We’ve got business to do here.’

‘Skedaddle?’ Ginny said, raising her eyebrows at me interrogatively. ‘Now there’s a word.’

‘Hhmm,’ I said, pantomiming deep thought, ‘I would say that the word skedaddle is very probably… of unknown origin.’

She considered this for a moment and then, gliding past me on her way over towards the door, whispered loudly, ‘A bit like yourself, Mr Spinola… darling.’

‘Ginny.’

She glanced back at me, ignoring her father, and was gone.

Shaking his head in exasperation, Van Loon looked over at the library door for a moment to make sure that his daughter had closed it properly. He picked up the folder again from the coffee table and said he was going to be straight with me. He had heard about my circus tricks down at Lafayette and wasn’t particularly impressed, but now that he’d had the chance to meet me in person, and talk, he was prepared to admit that he was a little more curious.

He handed me the folder.

‘I want your opinion on these, Eddie. Take the folder home with you, have a look through the files, take your time. Tell me if you think any of the stocks you see there look interesting.’

I flicked through the folder as he spoke and saw long sections of dense type, as well as endless pages of tables and charts and graphs.

‘Needless to say, all of this stuff is strictly confidential.’

I nodded of course.

He nodded back, and then said, ‘Can I offer you something to drink? The housekeeper’s not here I’m afraid – and Gabby’s… in a bad mood – so dinner’s a non-starter.’ He paused, as though trying to think of a way out of this dilemma, but quickly gave up. ‘Fuck it,’ he said, ‘I had a big lunch.’ Then he looked at me, obviously expecting an answer to his original question.

‘Scotch would be fine.’

‘Sure.’

Van Loon went over to a drinks cabinet in the corner of the room and as he poured two glasses of single malt Scotch whisky, he spoke back at me, over his shoulder.

‘I don’t know who you are, Eddie, or what your game is, but I’m sure of one thing, you don’t work in this business. I know all the moves, and so far you don’t seem to know any – but the thing is, I like that. You see, I deal with business graduates every day of the week, and I don’t know what it is – they’ve all got this look, this business-school look. It’s like they’re cocky and terrified at the same time, and I’m sick of it.’ He paused. ‘What I’m saying is this, I don’t care what your background is, or that maybe the nearest you’ve ever come to an investment bank is the business section of the New York Times. What matters’ – he turned around with a glass in each hand, and used one of them to indicate his belly – ‘is that you’ve got a fire in here, and if you’re smart on top of that, then nothing can stand in your way.’

He walked over and handed me one of the glasses of Scotch. I put the folder down on to the couch and took the glass from him. He held his up. Then a phone rang somewhere in the room.

‘Shit.’

Van Loon put his glass down on the coffee table and went back in the direction he’d just come from. The phone was on an antique writing desk beside the drinks cabinet. He picked it up and said, ‘Yeah?’ There was a silence and then he said, ‘Yeah. Good. Yeah. Yeah. Put him through.’

He covered the phone with his hand, turned to me and said, ‘I’ve got to take this call, Eddie. But sit down. Have your drink.’

I smiled briefly in acknowledgement.

‘I won’t be long.’

As Van Loon turned away again, and receded into a low-level murmur, I took a sip from the whisky and sat down on the couch. I was glad of the interruption, but couldn’t figure out why – at least not for a few seconds. Then it occurred to me: I wanted time to think about Ginny Van Loon and her little rant about the stock market and how it had reminded me so much of the kind of thing Melissa might have said. It seemed to me that despite obvious differences between them, the two women shared something – a similar, steely intelligence, as well as a style of delivery modelled on the heat-seeking missile. By referring to her father at one point as ‘Carl Van Loon’, for instance, but at all other times as ‘Daddy’, Ginny had not only displayed a sophisticated sense of detachment, she had also made him seem silly and vain and isolated. Which – by extension – was precisely how I now felt, too.

I told myself that Ginny’s comments could be dismissed as the cheap and easy nihilism of an overeducated teenager, but if that was the case, why was I so bothered by them?

I took a tiny plastic sachet from the inside pocket of my jacket, opened it and tapped a tablet out on to the palm of my hand. Making sure that Van Loon was facing away from me, I popped the tablet into my mouth and washed it down with a large gulp of whisky.

Then I picked up the folder, opened it at the first page and started reading.

The files contained background information on a series of small-to-medium sized businesses, from retail chains to software houses to aerospace and biotech companies. The material was dense and wide-ranging and included profiles of all the CEOs, as well as of other key personnel. There was technical analysis of price movements going back over a five-year period, and I found myself reading about peaks, troughs, points of resistance – stuff that a few weeks earlier would have been rarefied, incomprehensible fuzz, Mogadon for the eyes.

But just what did Carl Van Loon want? Did he want me to state the obvious, to point out that the Texas-based data-storage firm, Laraby, for example, whose stock had increased twenty thousand per cent over the last five years, was a good long-term investment? Or that the British retail chain, Watson’s – which had just recorded its worst ever losses, and whose CEO, Sir Colin Bird, had presided over similar losses at a venerable Scottish insurance company, Islay Mutual – was not? Was Van Loon seriously looking to me, a freelance copywriter, for recommendations about what stocks he should buy or sell? Again, I thought, hardly – but if that wasn’t the case, then what did he want?

After about fifteen minutes, Van Loon covered the phone again with his hand and said, ‘Sorry this is taking so long, Eddie, but it’s important.’

I shook my head, indicating that he shouldn’t be concerned, and then held up the folder as evidence that I was happily occupied. He went back to his low-level murmuring and I went back to the files.

The more I read, the simpler, and more simplistic, the whole thing seemed. He was testing me. As far as Van Loon was concerned I was a neophyte with a fire in my belly and a lip on me, and as such just might find this amount of concentrated information a little intimidating. He was hardly to know that in my current condition it wasn’t even a stretch. In any case, and for something to do, I decided to divide the files into three separate categories – the duds, the obvious high-performers and the ones that weren’t instantly categorizable as either.

Another fifteen minutes or so passed before Van Loon finally got off the phone and came over to retrieve his drink. He held it up, as before, and we clinked glasses. I got the impression that he was having a hard time suppressing a broad grin. A part of me wanted to ask him who he’d been on the phone to, but it didn’t seem appropriate. Another part of me wanted to ask him an endless series of questions about his daughter, but the moment didn’t seem right for that either – not, of course, that it ever would.

He glanced down at the folder beside me.

‘So did you get a chance to look through any of that stuff?’

‘Yes, Mr Van Loon, I did. It was interesting.’

He knocked back most of his drink in one go, placed the glass on the coffee table and sat down at the other end of the couch.

‘Any initial impressions?’

I said yes, cleared my throat and gave him my spiel about eliminating the duds and the high-performers. Then I recited a shortlist I’d drawn up of four or five companies that had real investment potential. I especially recommended that he buy stocks in Janex, a California biotech company, not based on its past performance, but rather on what I described, in a breathless rush, as ‘its telling and muscular strategy of pursuing intellectual-property litigation to protect its growing portfolio of patents’. I also recommended that he buy stocks in the French engineering giant BEA, based on the equally telling fact that the company seemed to be shedding everything except its fiber-optics division. I supported what I had to say with relevant data and quotes, including verbatim quotes from the transcripts of a lawsuit involving Janex. Van Loon looked at me in a curious way throughout, and it didn’t occur to me until I was coming to the end that a possible reason for this was because I hadn’t once referred back to the folder – that I had spoken entirely from memory.

Almost under his breath, and looking at the folder, he said, ‘Yeah. Janex… BEA. They’re the ones.’

I could see him trying to work something out – calculating, eyebrows furrowed, how much of the folder it might be possible to read in the length of time he’d been on the phone. Then he said, ‘That’s… amazing.’

He stood up and paced around the room for a bit. It was clear now that he was calculating something else.

‘Eddie,’ he said eventually, coming to a sudden halt and pointing back at the phone on the antique writing desk, ‘that was Hank Atwood I was talking to there. We’re having lunch on Thursday. I want you to come along.’

Hank Atwood, the Chairman of MCL-Parnassus, was routinely described as one of the ‘architects of the entertainment-industrial complex’.

‘Me?’

‘Yes, Eddie, and what’s more, I want you to come and work for me.’

In response to this I asked him the one question that I had promised Kevin I wouldn’t ask.

‘What’s going on with Atwood, Mr Van Loon?’

He held my gaze, took a deep breath, and then said, clearly against his better judgement, ‘We’re negotiating a takeover deal with Abraxas.’ He paused. ‘By Abraxas.’

Abraxas was the country’s second-largest Internet service provider. The three-year-old company had a market capitalization of $114 billion, scant profits to date, and – of course – attitude to burn. Compared to the venerable MCL-Parnassus, which had assets stretching back nearly sixty years, Abraxas was a mewling infant.

I said, barely able to contain my disbelief, ‘Abraxas buying out MCL?’

He nodded, but only just.

The kaleidoscope of possibilities opened up before me.

‘We’re mediating the deal,’ he said, ‘helping them to structure it, to engineer the financials, that kind of thing.’ He paused. ‘No one knows about this, Eddie. People are aware that I’m talking to Hank Atwood, but no one knows why. If this got out it could have a significant impact on the markets, but it’d also most likely kill the deal… so…’

He looked straight at me and let a shrug of his shoulders finish the thought.

I held up my hands, palms out. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not talking to anyone about this.’

‘And you realize that if you traded in either of these stocks – tomorrow morning down at Lafayette, say – you’d be contravening the rules as set down by the Securities and Exchange Commission…’

I nodded.

‘… and could go to prison?’

‘Look, Carl,’ I said, deciding to use his first name, ‘… you can trust me.’

‘I know that, Eddie,’ he said, with a hint of emotion in his voice, ‘I know that.’ He took a moment to compose himself and then went on. ‘Look, it’s a very complex process, and right now we’re at a crucial stage. I wouldn’t say we’re blocked exactly, but… we need someone to take a fresh look at it.’

I felt the rate of my heart-beat increase.

‘I’ve got an army of MBAs working for me down on Forty-eighth Street, Eddie, but the problem is I know how they think. I know what they’re going to tell me before they even open their mouths. I need someone like you. Someone who’s quick and isn’t going to bullshit me.’

I couldn’t believe this, and had a sudden flash of how incongruous it all seemed – Carl Van Loon needing someone like me?

‘I’m offering you a real chance here, Eddie, and I don’t care… I don’t care who you are… because I have a feeling about this.’

He reached down, picked up his glass from the coffee table and drained what was left in it.

‘That’s how I’ve always operated.’

Then he allowed the grin to break though.

‘This is going to be the biggest merger in American corporate history.’

Fighting off a slight queasiness, I grinned back.

He held up his hands. ‘So… Mr Spinola, what do you say?’

I struggled to think of something, but I was still in shock.

‘Look, maybe you need a little time to think about it – which is OK.’

Van Loon then reached down to the coffee table, took my glass in his other hand and as he walked over to the drinks cabinet to get refills, I felt the strong pull of his enthusiasm – and the ineluctable pull of an unlooked-for destiny – and knew that I had no choice but to accept.

13

I LEFT ABOUT AN HOUR LATER. Disappointingly, there was no sign of Ginny in the hallway as Van Loon ushered me out of the apartment, but by that point I was in such a state of euphoria that if I’d had to talk to her – or, for that matter, to anyone else – I probably wouldn’t have made much sense.

It was a cool evening, and as I strolled down Park Avenue I cast my mind back over the previous few weeks. It had been an extraordinary time in my life. I wasn’t hindered by anything or inhibited in any way, and not since my early twenties had I been able to look to the future with such energy, and – perhaps more significantly – without that debilitating dread of the ticking clock. With MDT-48, the future was no longer an accusation or a threat, no longer a precious resource that was running out. I could pack in so many things between now and the end of next week, say, that it actually felt as if the end of next week might never come.

At Fifty-seventh Street, waiting for a ‘Don’t Walk’ sign to change, a strong sense of gratitude for all of this welled up inside of me – though gratitude directed towards whom in particular I didn’t know. It was accompanied by an acute sense of exhilaration, and was quite physical, almost like a form of arousal. But then moments later, when I was half-way across Fifty-seventh Street, something weird happened – all of a sudden these feelings surged in intensity and I was overcome with dizziness. I reached out for something to lean against, but there wasn’t anything there and I had to stumble forward until I got to a wall on the other side of the street.

Several people skirted around me.

I closed my eyes and tried to catch my breath, but when I opened them again a few seconds later – or what seemed like a few seconds later – I jolted back in fright. Looking around me, at the buildings and at the traffic, I realized that I wasn’t on Fifty-seventh Street any more. I was a block further down. I was on the corner of Fifty-sixth Street.

It was the same thing that had happened the previous evening in my apartment. I had moved, but without being conscious of it, without registering that I had moved. It was as if I’d suffered a minor blackout – as if I’d trip-switched forward in some way, or click-clicked forward like on a faulty CD.

The previous evening was because of not having eaten – I’d been busy, distracted, food had taken a back seat. At least, that was the assumption, the rationalization.

Of course, I hadn’t eaten since then either, so maybe that was it. A little shaken, but not wishing to dwell too much on what had happened, I walked slowly along Fifty-sixth Street towards Lexington Avenue in search of a restaurant.

I found a diner on Forty-fifth Street and took a booth by the window.

‘C’n I get you, hon?’

I ordered a Porterhouse steak, rare, french fries and a side salad.

‘To drink?’

Coffee.

The place wasn’t busy. There was a guy at the counter, and a couple in the next booth up, and an old lady putting on lipstick in the next one up from that.

When the coffee arrived, I took a few sips and tried to relax. Then I decided to concentrate on the meeting I’d just had with Van Loon. I found myself reacting to it in two different ways.

On the one hand, I was beginning to feel a little nervous about taking up his job offer – which involved a nominal starting salary and some stock options, with whatever real money I made being on commissions. These would be from any successful deals that I recommended, brokered, negotiated, or, in the gnarled syntax befitting my current thought processes, participated in any phase of the negotiating of – like the MCL-Abraxas deal, for instance. But on what basis, I asked myself, had Van Loon been able to offer me such a deal? On the entirely spurious basis, perhaps, that I even had the slightest notion of how to ‘structure’ or ‘engineer the financials’ of a big corporate deal? Hardly. Van Loon had seemed to understand pretty unequivocally that I was an impostor, so he couldn’t be expecting that much from me. But what, precisely, would he be expecting? And would I be able to deliver?

The waitress arrived over with my steak and fries.

‘Njoy your meal.’

‘Thanks.’

Then – on the other hand – I had this clear vision in my mind of what a pushover Hank Atwood was going to be. I had read articles about him that used woolly terms such as ‘vision’, ‘commitment’, ‘driven’, and it just seemed to me that whatever the nature of that thing I had triggered in the others really was – I would have no difficulty in triggering the same thing in him. This, in turn, of course, would place me in a potentially very powerful position – because as the new CEO of MCL-Abraxas, Hank Atwood would not only have the ear of the President and of other world leaders, he would be a world leader himself. The military superpower was a thing of the past, a dinosaur, and the only structure that counted in the world today was the ‘hyperpower’, the digitalized, globalized English-language based entertainment culture that controlled the hearts, minds and disposable incomes of successive generations of 18 to 24-year-olds – and Hank Atwood, who I would shortly be making friends with, was about to be placed at the apex of that structure.

But then all of a sudden, without warning or reason, I’d swing back to thinking that Carl Van Loon was surely going to come to his senses and at the very least withdraw the job offer.

And where would that leave me?

The waitress approached my booth again and held up the coffee pot.

I nodded and she refilled my cup.

‘What’s the matter, hon? You don’t like your steak?’

I glanced down at my plate. I’d barely touched the food.

‘No, no, it’s fine,’ I said, looking up at her. She was a big woman in her forties, with big eyes and big hair. ‘I’m a just little concerned about the future, that’s all.’

‘The future?’ she repeated, laughing out loud and walking away with the coffee pot held up in mid-air. ‘Get in line, honey, get in line.’

When I got home to the apartment, the little red light was flashing on my answering machine. I reached down and flicked the ‘play’ button and waited. There were seven messages – which was about five or six more than I had ever received on it before at any one time.

I sat on the edge of the couch and stared at the machine.

Click.

Beeep.

‘Eddie, this is Jay. I just wanted to let you know – and I hope you won’t be pissed at me – but I was talking to a journalist from the Post this evening, and I… I gave her your number. She’d heard about you and wanted to do a story, so… I’m sorry, I should have checked with you first, but… anyway… see you tomorrow.’

Click.

Beeep.

‘It’s Kevin.’ Long pause. ‘How was dinner? What did you guys talk about? Give me a call when you get in.’ There was another long pause and then he hung up.

Click.

Beeep.

‘Eddie, it’s your father. How are you? Any stock tips for me? (Laughter.) Listen, I’m going on vacation to Florida next month with the Szypulas. Give me a call. I hate these goddamned machines.’

Click.

Beeep.

‘Mr Spinola, this is Mary Stern from the New York Post. I got your number from Jay Zollo at Lafayette Trading. Erm… I’d like to speak with you as soon as possible. Erm… I’ll try you again later, or in the morning. Thank you.’

Click.

Beeep.

Pause.

‘Why you don’t call me?’ Shit, I’d forgotten about Gennady. ‘… I have some idea for that thing, so call me.’

Click.

Beeep.

‘It’s Kevin again. You’re a real jerk, Spinola, do you know that?’ His voice was slurred now. ‘I mean, who the fuck do you think you are, eh? Mike fucking Ovitz? Well, let me tell you something about peop-’ There was a muffled sound at that point, like something being knocked over. A barely audible shhhiit followed, and suddenly the line went dead.

Click.

Beeep.

‘Look – just fuck you, OK? Fuck you, fuck your mother, fuck your sister.’

Click.

That was it. End of new messages.

I got up from the couch, went into the bedroom and took off my suit.

Kevin I could do nothing about. He would have to be my first casualty. Jay Zollo, Mary Stern, Gennady and my old man I could deal with in the morning.

I went into the bathroom, turned on the shower and stepped under the jet of hot water. I didn’t need these distractions and I certainly didn’t want to waste any time thinking about them. After my shower, I put on a pair of boxer-shorts and a T-shirt. Then I sat at my desk, took another MDT pill and started making notes.

In the dimly lit library of his Park Avenue apartment, Van Loon had sketched out the problem for me. The bottom line, predictably enough, was that the principals in the deal couldn’t agree on a valuation. MCL stock was currently selling at $26 a share, but they were asking Abraxas for $40 – a 54 per cent premium, which was way above the average for an acquisition of this kind. Van Loon had to find a way of either reducing the MCL asking-price or of justifying it to Abraxas.

He’d said that he would have some material couriered down to my apartment in the morning, relevant paperwork that I really needed to have a look at ahead of Thursday’s lunch meeting with Hank Atwood. But I decided that before any ‘relevant paperwork’ arrived I needed to do some research of my own.

I went online and skimmed through hundreds of pages of material relating to corporate financing. I learned the basics of structuring a takeover deal and examined dozens of case histories. I followed a trail of links throughout the night and at one point even found myself studying advanced, mathematical formulae for determining the value of stock options.

I took a break at 5 a.m. and watched some TV – re-runs of Star Trek and Ironside.

At around 9 a.m., the courier arrived with the material Van Loon had promised. It was another thick folder, containing annual and quarterly reports, analysts’ assessments, internal management accounts and operational plans. I spent the day wading through all of this stuff and by late afternoon felt that I had reached some sort of a plateau. I wanted the lunch with Hank Atwood to be happening now, and not in twenty hours’ time, but I had probably absorbed as much information as I was going to, so I figured that what I needed at this point was a little R & R.

I tried to get some sleep, but I couldn’t settle down – not even enough to doze for a few minutes, and neither could I bring myself to watch any more TV, so I eventually decided to just go and sit on a bar-stool somewhere, and have a couple of drinks, and chill out.

Before leaving the apartment, I forced myself to take a handful of diet-supplement pills and to eat some fruit. I also phoned Jay Zollo and Mary Stern, who I’d been fielding calls from all day. I told a distraught-sounding Jay that I’d been unwell and hadn’t felt like going in. I told Mary Stern that I didn’t want to talk to her, no matter who the hell she was, and that she was to stop calling me. I didn’t phone Gennady, or the old man.

On my way downstairs, I calculated that I hadn’t slept in nearly forty hours, and had probably, in any case, only slept a total of six hours in the seventy-two previous to that, so although I didn’t feel it and didn’t look it, I realized that at some level I must have been in a state of complete and utter physical exhaustion.

It was early evening and traffic was heavy, just like on that first evening when I’d come out of the cocktail lounge over on Sixth Avenue. I walked, therefore, rather than taking a cab – floated, in fact – floated through the streets, and with a vague sensation of moving through a kind of virtual-reality environment, a screenscape where colours contrasted sharply and perception of depth was slightly muted. Any time I turned a corner the movements I made seemed jerky and angular and guided, so after about twenty-five minutes, when I found myself lurching sideways all of a sudden and entering a bar in Tribeca, a place called the Congo, it was as though I were entering a new phase of play in some advanced computer game, and one with pretty realistic graphics – there was a long wooden bar to the left, wicker stools, a railed mezzanine at the back and enormous potted plants everywhere that reached right up to the ceiling.

I sat at the bar and ordered a Bombay and tonic.

The place wasn’t too crowded, though it would probably be filling up fairly soon. There were some people to my left, two women sitting at stools – but facing away from the bar – and three men standing around them. Two of these were doing the talking, with the others sipping drinks, pulling on cigarettes and listening carefully. The subject of conversation was the NBA and Michael Jordan and the huge revenues he’d generated for the game. I don’t know at what point it started again, exactly, that trip-switching forward thing, or click-clicking forward like on a faulty CD, but when it did I had no control whatsoever and could only observe, witness, each segment and each flash, as though each segment and each flash – as well as the greater, unrevealed whole – were happening to someone else and not to me. The first jump was very abrupt and came as I was reaching out to pick up my drink. I’d just made contact with the cold, moist surface of the glass, when suddenly, without any warning or movement, I found myself on the other side of the group, standing very close to one of the women – a thirtyish brunette in a short green skirt, not excessively slim, distinctive blue eyes… my left hand hovering somewhere in the airspace above her right thigh…

… and I was in mid-sentence…

‘… yeah, but don’t forget that ESPN was set up in 1979, and with $10 million of seed money from Getty Oil for Christ’s sake…’

‘What’s that got-’

‘It’s got everything to do with it. It changed everything. Because of a shrewd business decision college basketball players were suddenly becoming household names overnight…

For a split second I was aware that one of the men – a chubby guy in a silk suit – was glaring at me. He was tense and sweaty and his eyes were drawn irresistibly to my left hand – but then… click, click, click… the barman was in front of me, waving his arms around, blocking my view. He looked Irish and had tired eyes that said pleeease, enough. Meanwhile, behind him – and only partially visible now – the chubby guy in the silk suit was holding a hand up to his face, trying to stop the flow of blood from his nose…

‘Fuck you, pal…

‘Fuck you…’

The cool evening air touched the hairs on the back of my neck as I staggered away from the barman and out on to the street. The woman in the short green skirt was there too, just inside the door, pushing away someone who was behind her. She said something I didn’t catch and then quickly manoeuvred herself around the barman, dodging his arms, but half a second later – inexplicably – she was linking arms with me a couple of blocks down the street.

Then we were in a cubicle together, a stall in the bathroom of a nightclub or a bar, and I was pulling away from her, withdrawing – her legs spread out against a backdrop of chrome, and white porcelain, and black tiles… her green skirt torn and dangling from the toilet seat, her blouse open, beads of sweat glistening between her breasts. As I leant back against the door, hurriedly doing up my trousers, she remained in position, with her eyes closed and head swaying rhythmically from side to side. In the background, there was some kind of pulsating music, as well as the periodic roar of electric hand-dryers and raised voices and manic laughter, and from the next cubicle what sounded like the flicking of lighters followed by sharp, rapid inhalations of smoke…

I closed my eyes at that point, but when I opened them a second later I was moving across a crowded dance floor – pushing past people, elbowing them, snarling at them. In another few moments, I was out on the street again, negotiating my way through more crowds and through heavy streams of traffic. Soon after that I seem to remember climbing into the familiar comfort of a yellow cab, sinking into the cheap plastic upholstery of the back seat and gazing out at the tawdry streaks of neon that stretched the city out, pulled it this way and that, like so many strands of multi-coloured chewing-gum. I also remember being acutely aware of my right hand, which was sore, throbbing in fact, from having punched that guy back at the Congo – something, incidentally, I couldn’t believe I’d done. At any rate, the next thing I knew I was in the lobby of an Upper West Side restaurant – a place I’d read about called Actium – insinuating, pushing, my way into another conversation with another set of complete strangers, this time half a dozen members of some local art-gallery crowd. Posing as a collector, I introduced myself as Thomas Cole. Like before, I perpetually seemed to be in mid-sentence – ‘… and already in eighteen hundred and four the Noble Savage has become the Demonic Indian, it’s there in Vanderlyn’s Murder of Jane McCrea, the dark, rippling musculature, the ogre’s raised tomahawk ready to strike at the woman’s head…’ I was probably as surprised by what I was saying as anyone else, but I couldn’t press pause, couldn’t do anything except endure it, and watch. Then it was click, click, click again and all of a sudden we were sitting around a table together having dinner.

To my left was an intense guy with a salt-and-pepper beard wearing a carefully crumpled linen jacket, probably an art critic, and to my right was a Bernice-bobs-her-hair type of woman with bony bits sticking out of her every time she moved. Directly opposite me was a heavy Latino guy in a suit who was talking non-stop. He spoke in English, but it was norteamericano this and norteamericano that, and in a fairly disparaging tone. I realized after a few moments that the man I was looking at was Rodolfo Alvarez, the celebrated Mexican painter who’d recently moved to Manhattan and undertaken to recreate, from notebooks, the destroyed Diego Rivera mural originally destined for the lobby of the RCA Building in 1933.

Man at the Crossroads Looking with Hope and High Vision to the Choosing of a Better Future.

The dark-haired and very beautiful woman in a black dress, sitting to his left, was the sultry Donatella, his wife.

I’d read a profile of them in Vanity Fair.

How the fuck had I ended up with these people?

‘That’s ironic,’ the salt-and-pepper guy was saying to someone, ‘the choosing of a better future.’

‘What’s so ironic about that?’ I heard myself saying, and then sighing impatiently. ‘If you don’t choose your future, who the hell’s going to do it for you?’

‘Well,’ said Donatella Alvarez, smiling across the table – and smiling directly at me - ‘that is the North American way, isn’t it, Mr Cole?’

‘I beg your pardon?’ I said, a little taken aback.

‘Time,’ she said calmly. ‘For you it is in a straight line. You look back at the past, and can disregard it if you so wish. You look towards the future… and, if you so wish, can choose it to be a better future. You can choose to become perfect…’

She was still smiling, and all I could say was, ‘So?’

‘For us, in Mexico,’ she said very deliberately, as though explaining something to a small child, ‘the past and the present and the future… they co-exist.’

I kept staring at her, but in the next moment she seemed to be in the middle of a sentence to someone else.

From this point on things got more and more fragmented, disjointed – jagged. Most of it I can’t remember at all – apart from a few strong sense impressions, the weird colour and texture of mussels in white wine, for instance… swirls of dense cigar smoke, thick, glistening daubs of colour. I seem to recall seeing hundreds of tubes and brushes laid out in lines on a wooden floor, and dozens of canvases, some rolled, others framed and stacked.

Soon, painted figures, lurid and bulging, were mingling with real people in a terrifying kaleidoscope, and I found myself reaching out for something to lean against, but quickly focusing instead – across a crowded loft space – on the deep, earthy pools that were the eyes of Donatella Alvarez…

Next, and in what seemed like a flash, I was walking down an empty corridor in a hotel… having been in a room, quite definitely been in a room, but with no recollection of whose room, or of what had happened in that room, or of how I’d wound up there in the first place. Then, another flash and I wasn’t in a hotel corridor any more but walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, quickly, and in time to something – in time, I soon realized, to the suspension cables flickering in geometric patterns against the pale blue of the early morning sky.

I stopped and turned around.

I looked back at the familiar postcard view of downtown Manhattan, aware now that I couldn’t properly account for the last eight hours of my life – but aware, too, that I was fully conscious again, and alert and cold and sore all over. I quickly decided that whatever reasons I’d had for walking to Brooklyn had surely atrophied by now, seized up, been lost to some fossilized energy configuration that could never be re-animated. So I headed back over the bridge towards downtown, and walked – limped, as it turned out – all the way home to my apartment on Tenth Street.

14

I SAYLIMPED, because I had obviously sprained my left ankle at some point during the night. And when I was getting undressed to take a shower, I saw that there was extensive bruising on my body. This explained the soreness – or partly explained it – but in addition to these leaden blue patches on my chest and ribs, there was something else… something that looked curiously like a cigarette burn on my right forearm. I ran a finger over the small reddish mark, pressed it, winced, then circled it slowly – and as I did so, I felt a deep sense of unease, an incipient terror, tightening its grip around my solar plexus.

But I resisted, because I didn’t want to think about this – didn’t want to think about what may or may not have gone on in some hotel room, didn’t want to think about any of it. I had a meeting with Carl Van Loon and Hank Atwood in a few hours’ time and what I needed more than anything else – certainly more than I needed a debilitating panic attack – was to get myself organized.

And focused.

So I took two more pills, shaved, got dressed and started going over the notes I’d made the previous day.

The arrangement with Van Loon was that I’d show up at his office on Forty-eighth Street at around 10 a.m. We’d have a talk about the situation, compare notes and maybe devise a provisional gameplan. Then we’d go to meet Hank Atwood for lunch.

In the cab on the way to Forty-eighth Street, I tried to concentrate on the intricacies of corporate financing, but I kept being appalled anew at what had happened and at the degree of recklessness I was clearly capable of.

An eight-hour blackout?

Might that not just have constituted a warning sign?

But then I remembered getting sick in a bathroom once, years ago – actually throwing up blood into the washbasin – and immediately afterwards going back out to the living-room, to the little pile of product in the centre of the table… and to the cigarettes and to the vodka and to the elastic, malleable, untrackable conversation…

And then – twenty minutes later – having it happen again.

And again.

So… obviously not.

I stopped the cab at Forty-seventh Street and walked the remaining block to the Van Loon Building. By the time I got into the lobby, I had just about managed to suppress my limp. I was greeted by Van Loon’s personal assistant and taken up to a large suite of offices on the sixty-second floor. I noticed that in the general design of the place – in the corridors and in the enormous reception area – there was an impeccable though slightly bewildering blend of the traditional and the modern, the stuffy and the streamlined – a sumptuous, seamless fusion of mahogany, ebony, marble, steel, chrome and glass. This made the company seem, at once, like an august, venerable institution and a pared-down, front-line operation – staffed mostly, I have to say, by guys about fifteen years my junior. Nevertheless, I had a keen sense that nothing here was beyond me, that it was all for the taking, that the corporate structure of a place like this was delicate and gossamer-thin and would yield to the slightest pressure.

But as I sat down in the reception area, beneath a huge Van Loon & Associates company logo, my mood shifted again, lurched a little closer to the edge, and I was assailed by queasiness and doubt.

How had I ended up here?

How had I come to be working for a private investment bank?

Why was I wearing a suit?

Who was I?

I’m not sure I know the answers to these questions even now. In fact, a few moments ago – in the bathroom of the Northview Motor Lodge – staring into the mugshot-sized mirror above the stained wash-basin, with the hum and occasional rattle of the ice-machine outside penetrating the walls, and my skull, I struggled to see even a trace of the individual that had begun to form and crystallize out of that mass of chemically-induced impulses and counter-impulses, out of that irresistible surge of busyness. I searched, too, in the lines of my face for any indications of the individual I might eventually have become – a big-time player, a destroyer, a spiritual descendant of Jay Gould – but all there was in my reflection, all I recognized, with no real indications of anything the future might have held, was me… the familiar face of a thousand shaves.

I waited in the reception area for nearly half an hour, staring at what I took to be an original Goya on a wall opposite where I was sitting. The receptionist was extremely friendly and smiled over at me every now and again. When Van Loon finally arrived, he strolled across reception with a broad smile on his face. He slapped me on the back and ushered me into his office, which was about half the size of Rhode Island.

‘Sorry for the delay, Eddie, but I’ve been overseas.’

Flicking through some documents on his desk, he then explained that he’d flown in direct from Tokyo on his new Gulfstream V.

‘You’ve been to Tokyo and back since Tuesday evening?’ I asked.

He nodded and said that having waited sixteen months to get the new jet, he’d wanted to make sure that it was worth its not inconsiderable price tag of $37m and change. His delay in arriving this morning, he added after a pause, had had nothing to do with the jet, but was rather the fault of gridlocked Manhattan traffic. It seemed to matter to him that I understood this.

I nodded, therefore, to show him that I did.

‘So, Eddie,’ he said, sitting down behind the desk, and indicating that I should sit down too, ‘did you have a chance to look at those files?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘And?’

‘They were interesting.’

‘And?’

‘I don’t think you should really have much difficulty justifying the price that MCL is asking,’ I began, shifting in the seat, aware suddenly of how tired I was.

‘Why not?’

‘Because there are some very significant options embedded in this deal, strategic stuff that isn’t evident in the existing numbers.’

‘Such as?’

‘Well, the biggest option value lies in the build-out of a broadband infrastructure, which is something Abraxas really needs…’

‘Why?’

‘To defend itself against aggressive competition – some other portal that might be in a position to develop faster downloads, streaming video, that kind of thing.’

As I spoke – and through the almost hallucinatory quality of my exhaustion – I was becoming conscious of how large a gap there was between information and knowledge, between the huge amount of data I’d absorbed in the last forty-eight hours and the arrangement of that data into a coherent argument.

‘The thing is,’ I went on, ‘building-out broadband is a big cash drain and highly risky, but since Abraxas has a leading portal brand already, all it really needs is a credible threat to develop its own broadband.’

Van Loon nodded his head slowly at this.

‘So, by buying MCL, Abraxas gets that credibility, without actually having to complete the build-out, at least not straightaway.’

‘How’s that?’

‘MCL owns Cableplex, yeah? That puts them directly into twenty-five million homes, so even though they might need to upgrade their systems they’re ahead of the game. Meanwhile, Abraxas can slow down MCL’s spend on the broadband build-out, thereby delaying any negative cashflow, but retaining the option to develop it later should they need to…’ I was having a sensation I’d had a couple of times before on MDT – one of walking on a verbal tightrope, of speaking to someone and clearly making sense, but at the same time of having no idea at all what I was talking about. ‘… and remember, Carl, the ability to delay an investment decision like that can have enormous value.’

‘But it still remains risky, doesn’t it? I mean, developing this broadband thing? Regardless of whether you do it now or later?’

‘Sure, but the new company that comes out of this deal probably won’t have to make the investment in any case, because I think they’d actually be better off negotiating a deal with another broadband player, which would have the added advantage of reducing potential overcapacity in the industry.’

Van Loon smiled.

‘That’s pretty fucking good, Eddie.’

I smiled too.

‘Yeah, I think it works. It’s basically a win-win situation. And there are other options as well, of course.’

I could see Van Loon looking at me and wondering. He was obviously unsure of what to ask me next… in case it all fell apart and I somehow revealed myself to be an idiot. But he eventually asked me the only question that made any sense in the circumstances.

‘How do the numbers add up?’

I reached out and took a legal pad from his desk, and a pen from my inside jacket pocket. I leant forward and started writing. After I’d gotten a few lines down on the page, I said, ‘I’ve used the Black-Scholes pricing model to show how the option value varies as a percentage of the underlying investment…’ – I stopped, flipped over the page and continued writing at the top of the next one – ‘… and I’ve done it over a range of risk profiles and time-frames.’

I wrote furiously for the next fifteen minutes or so, copying from memory the various mathematical formulae I’d used the previous day to illustrate my position.

‘As you can see here,’ I said, when I’d finished, pointing to the appropriate formulae with my pen, ‘the value of the broadband option together with these other options easily adds an extra $10 a share in value to the MCL stock.’

Van Loon smiled again.

Then he said, ‘This is just great work, Eddie. I don’t know what to say. This is just great. Hank’s going to love this.’

At about twelve-fifteen, after we’d gone through all the figures carefully, we wrapped up and left the office. Van Loon had booked a table for us at the Four Seasons. We made our way over towards Park Avenue and then strolled the four blocks uptown to the Seagram Building.

I had floated along during most of the morning in an icy and exhausted state of awareness – on automatic pilot in a way – but when I arrived with Van Loon at the Fifty-second Street entrance to the Four Seasons restaurant, and passed through the lobby, and saw the Miró tapestries and the leather seats designed by Mies van der Rohe himself, I began to feel energized again. More than being able to speak Italian, or read half a dozen books in a night, or even second-guess the markets, more than the fact that I had just outlined the financial structure for a huge corporate merger, it was being here, at the base of the Seagram Building, the holy of architectural holies, that brought the unreality of my entire situation home to me – because under normal circumstances I would never have found myself in a place like this, would never have found myself swanning into the legendary Grill Room, with its suspended bronze rods and French walnut panelling, would never have found myself gliding past tables occupied by ambassadors and cardinals and corporation presidents and entertainment lawyers and network anchormen.

And yet, strange as it seemed, here I was… happy to be swanning and gliding…

The maître d’ led us to one of the tables under the balcony, and just as we’d settled down and ordered some drinks Van Loon’s cellphone went off. He answered it with a barely audible grunt, listened for a couple of moments and then flicked it closed. As he was putting it away, he looked at me with a thin, slightly nervous smile.

‘Hank’s running a little late,’ he said.

‘But he’s coming, right?’

‘Yes.’ Van Loon fiddled with his napkin for a moment, and then said, ‘Listen, Eddie, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you about.’

I swallowed, unsure of what was coming next.

‘You know that we have a small trading floor at Van Loon & Associates?’

I shook my head.

‘Well, we have, and I was thinking – that run of trades you made at Lafayette?’

‘Yeah?’

‘That was pretty impressive, you know.’

A waiter arrived over with our drinks.

‘I didn’t really think so when Kevin told me about it at first, but I’ve looked into it since, and well…’ – he held my gaze as the waiter laid out two glasses on the table, plus two half-bottles of mineral water, a Tom Collins and a vodka Martini – ‘… you certainly seem to know what you’re doing.’

I took a sip from the Martini.

Still staring at me, Van Loon added, ‘And how to pick them.’

I could see that he was burning to ask me how I’d done it. He kept shifting in his seat and glancing directly at me, unsure of what he had in his possession, tantalized at the prospect that maybe I did have some system after all, and that the Holy Grail was right here in the Four Seasons restaurant, sitting at his table. He was tantalized, and at the same time a little apprehensive, but he held off, skirted around the issue, tried to act as if the whole thing wasn’t that big a deal. There was something pathetic and awkward about the way he did this, though – it was ham-fisted, and I began to feel a mild contempt for him stirring inside me.

But if he had asked me straight out, what would I have said? Would I have been able to bluff my way through some yarn about complexity theory and advanced mathematics? Would I have leant forward in my chair, tapped my right temple and whispered un-derstand-ing, Carl? Would I have told him that I actually was on special medication, and that I had occasional visions of the Virgin Mary, to boot? Would I have told him the truth? Would I have been able to resist?

I don’t know.

I never got the chance to find out.

A few moments later, a friend of Van Loon’s appeared from across the room and sat at our table. Van Loon introduced me and we all engaged in small talk for a few moments, but pretty quickly the two older men got to discussing Van Loon’s Gulfstream, and I was happy to fade into the background. I could see that Van Loon was agitated, though – torn between not wanting to let me out of his immediate sphere of attention and not wanting to disengage from the conversation with his billionaire crony. But I was already gone, my mind drifting into a contemplation of the impending arrival of Hank Atwood.

From the various profiles I’d read of him, something had become clear to me about the Chairman of MCL-Parnassus. Even though he was a ‘suit’, a grey corporate executive who mainly concerned himself with what most people thought of as the tedious business of numbers and percentage points, Henry Bryant Atwood was a glamorous figure. There had been larger-than-life ‘suits’ before him, of course – in newspapers, and in the early days of Hollywood, all those cigar-toting moguls who couldn’t speak English, for example – but it hadn’t taken long, in the case of Hollywood, for the ivy-league accountants on the East Coast to step in and take the reins. What most people didn’t understand, however, was that since the full-steam-ahead corporatization of the entertainment business in the 1980s, the centre of gravity had shifted again. Actors and singers and supermodels were still glamorous, sure, but the rarefied air of pure glamour had quietly wafted its way back in the direction of the grey-suited moneymen.

Hank Atwood was glamorous, not because he was good-looking, which he wasn’t, and not even because the product he pedalled was the very stuff of people’s dreams – the genetically modified food of the world’s imagination – Hank Atwood was glamorous because of the unimaginably huge amounts of money he made.

And that was the thing. Artistic content was dead, something to be decided by committee. True content now resided in the numbers – and numbers, large numbers, were everywhere. Thirty-seven million dollars for a private jet. A lawsuit settled for $250 million. A $30 billion leveraged buyout. Personal wealth amounting to something in excess of $100 billion…

And it was at that point – while I was in the middle of this reverie of infinite numerical expansion – that things started to unravel.

For whatever reason, I suddenly became aware of the people sitting at the table behind me. They were a man and a woman, maybe a real-estate developer and an executive producer, or two trial lawyers – I didn’t know, I wasn’t focused on what they were saying – but there was something in the tone of the man’s voice that cut through me like a knife.

I leant backwards a little in my chair, simultaneously glancing over at Van Loon and his friend. Set against the walnut panelling, the two billionaires looked like large, predatory birds perched deep in some arid canyon – but ageing ones, with drooping heads and rheumy eyes, old buzzards. Van Loon was involved in a detailed explanation of how he’d been driven to sound-proofing his previous jet, a Challenger something-or-other, and it was during this little monologue that a curious thing happened in my brain. Like a radio receiver automatically switching frequencies, it closed out Carl Van Loon’s voice, ‘… you see, to avoid undue vibrations, you need these isolator things to wrap around the bolts that connect the interior to the airframe – silicone rubber isolators, I think they’re called…’ and started receiving the voice of the guy behind me, ‘… in a big hotel downtown somewhere… it was on a news bulletin earlier… yeah, Donatella Alvarez, the painter’s wife, found on the floor of a hotel room, she’d been attacked apparently, blow to the head… and now she’s in a coma – but it seems they’ve got a lead already – a cleaner at the hotel saw someone leaving the place early this morning, someone with a limp…’

I pushed my chair back a little.

… someone with a limp…

The voice behind me droned on, ‘… and of course her being Mexican doesn’t help with all of this stuff going on…’

I stood up, and for a split second it felt as if everyone in the restaurant had stopped what they were doing, had put their knives and forks down and were looking up, expecting me to address them – but they hadn’t, of course, and weren’t. Only Carl Van Loon was looking up at me, a mild flicker of concern in his eyes suddenly lurching into overdrive. I mouthed the word bathroom at him, turned away and started walking. I went quickly, moving between tables, and around tables, looking for the nearest exit.

But then I noticed someone approaching from the other side of the room – a short, balding man in a grey suit. It was Hank Atwood. I recognized him from magazine photographs. A second later we were passing each other, shuffling awkwardly between two tables, grunting politely. For a brief moment we were so close that I could smell his cologne.

I got outside on to Fifty-second Street and took in huge gulps of air. As I stood there on the sidewalk, looking around me, I had the sense that by joining the busy crowds out here I’d forfeited my right to be in the Grill Room, and that I wouldn’t be allowed back inside.

But right now I had no intention of going back inside, and about twenty minutes later I found myself wandering aimlessly down Park Avenue South, consciously suppressing my limp, racking my memory to see if I could recall anything. But there was nothing… I had been in a hotel room and could even see myself walking down an empty hotel corridor. But that was it, everything else was a blank.

I didn’t really believe, though… I mean… I didn’t… I couldn’t…

For the next half-hour, I walked – cutting left at Union Square, then right on First – and arrived back at my building in a complete daze. I walked up the stairs, holding on to the notion that perhaps I’d been hearing things in the restaurant, that I’d imagined it – that it had simply been another blip, a glitch. In any case, I was going to find out pretty soon, because if this thing really had happened, it would still be on the news, so all I had to do was tune in to the radio, or switch on one of the local TV channels…

But the first thing I noticed when I got into the apartment was the little red light flashing on my answering machine. Almost glad of the distraction, I reached down at once and flicked the ‘play’ button. Then I just stood there in my suit, like an idiot, staring out across the room, waiting to hear the message.

There was the low hum as the tape rewound, and then – click.

Beeep.

‘Hi… Eddie. It’s Melissa. I’ve been meaning to call you, I really have, but… you know how it is…’ Her voice was a little heavy, and a little slurred, but it was still Melissa’s voice, still Melissa, disembodied, filling up my living-room – ‘Then something occurred to me, my brother… was he giving you anything? I mean – I don’t want to talk about this over the phone, but… was he? Because…’ – I heard ice-cubes clinking in a glass – ‘… because if he was, you should know something… that stuff…’ – she paused here, as though composing herself – ‘that stuff – MDT-whatever – is really, really dangerous – I mean, you don’t know how dangerous.’ I swallowed, and closed my eyes. ‘So look, Eddie, I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong – but… just call me, OK… call me.’