Limitless

15

A TV NEWSCAST AT TWO O’CLOCK confirmed that Donatella Alvarez, the wife of the Mexican painter, had received a severe blow to the head and was now in a coma. The incident had taken place in a room on the fifteenth floor of a midtown hotel. There were few details given, and no mention was made of any man with a limp.

I sat on the couch, in my suit, and waited for more, anything – another bulletin, some footage, analysis. It was as if sitting on the couch with the remote control hanging limply in my hand was actually doing something, but what else was I going to do that would be any better? Phone up Melissa and ask her if this was the kind of thing she’d had in mind?

Dangerous?

What – as in severe blow to the head dangerous? Hospitalization dangerous? Coma dangerous? Death dangerous?

Obviously, I had no intention of phoning her up with questions like these, but a part of me was riddled with anxiety none the less. Had I really done it? Was the same thing – or something like it – going to happen again? Did Melissa’s ‘dangerous’ mean dangerous to others, or simply dangerous to me?

Was I being hugely irresponsible?

What the fuck was going on?

As the afternoon progressed, I concentrated intently on each news bulletin, as though by sheer force of will I could somehow alter a key detail in the story – have it not be a hotel room, or have Donatella Alvarez not be in a coma. Between the bulletins, I watched cookery shows, live courtroom broadcasts, soaps, commercials, and was aware of myself – unable to help it – processing and storing random bits of useless information. Lay the chicken strips flat on a lightly oiled baking tray and sprinkle with sesame seeds. Call toll-free NOW for a 15 per cent markdown on The GUTbuster 2000 home work-out system. On several occasions during the afternoon, I glanced over at the phone and considered calling Melissa, but each time some override mechanism in my brain kicked in and I immediately found myself thinking about something else.

By six o’clock, the story had begun to flesh out considerably. After a reception at her husband’s Upper West Side studio, Donatella Alvarez had made her way to a midtown hotel, the Clifden, where she received a single blow to the head with a blunt instrument. The instrument had not as yet been identified, but a key question that remained unanswered was this: what had Señora Alvarez been doing in a hotel room in the first place? Detectives were interviewing all the guests who’d attended the reception, and were especially interested in speaking to an individual named Thomas Cole.

I stared at the screen for a couple of seconds, perplexed, barely recognizing the name myself. Then the report moved on, and so did I. They gave personal information about the victim, as well as photographs and interviews with family members – all of which meant that before long a very human picture of the 43-year-old Señora Alvarez had begun forming itself in the viewer’s mind. Here, apparently, was a woman of rare physical and spiritual beauty. She was independent, generous, loyal, a loving wife, a devoted mother to twin baby girls, Pia and Flor. Her husband, Rodolfo Alvarez, was reported to be distraught and at a complete loss for any explanation as to what might have happened. They showed a black-and-white photograph of a radiant, uniformed schoolgirl attending a Dominican convent in Rome, circa 1971. They also showed some home-movie footage, flickering images in faded colour of a young Donatella in a summery dress walking through a rose garden. Other images included Donatella on horseback, Donatella at an archeological dig in Peru, Donatella and Rodolfo in Tibet.

The next phase in the reporting consisted of political analysis. Was this a racially motivated attack? Was it connected in some way to the current foreign policy débâcle? One commentator expressed the fear that it could be the first in a series of such incidents and blamed the attack squarely on the President’s bewildering failure to condemn Defense Secretary Caleb Hale’s intemperate remarks – or alleged remarks, since he was still denying that he’d actually made them. Another commentator seemed to feel that this was collateral damage of a kind we were simply going to have to get used to.

All through the afternoon, as I watched these reports, I clocked up a bewildering number of reactions – chief among them disbelief, terror, remorse, anger. I vacillated between thinking that maybe I had struck the blow and dismissing the idea as absurd. Towards the end, however – and after I’d taken a top-up of MDT – the only discernible thing I could feel was mild boredom.

By mid-evening, I was quite detached from everything and whenever I heard a reference to the story, my impulse was to say enough, already, as though they were talking about a new mini-series on a cable channel, something adapted from an over-hyped magic-realist pot-boiler… The Dreadful Ordeal of Donatella Alvarez…

A little after 8.30, I called Carl Van Loon at his apartment on Park Avenue.

Although the disbelief, terror, etc. of earlier had been uppermost in my mind for a good deal of the afternoon, another part of me had been riddled with anxiety of a different kind – anxiety about having blown my chances with Van Loon, about the extent to which this glitch, this operational malfunction, was going to interfere with my plans for the future.

As a result – and waiting for Van Loon to come to the phone – I was quite nervous.

‘Eddie?’

I cleared my throat. ‘Mr Van Loon.’

‘Eddie, I don’t understand. What happened?’

‘I got sick,’ I said – the excuse coming to me automatically – ‘there was nothing I could do about it. I had to leave like that. I’m sorry.’

‘You got sick? What are you, in first grade? You rush off without saying a word? You don’t come back? I’m left there looking like a jerk, making excuses to Hank fucking Atwood?’

‘I have a condition, a stomach condition.’

‘Then you don’t even bother to call?’

‘I needed to see a doctor, Carl. In a hurry.’

Van Loon was silent for a moment.

Then he sighed. ‘Well… how are you now?’

‘I’m fine. It’s taken care of.’

He sighed again. ‘Are you… what?… I don’t know… are you getting proper treatment for this thing? You want the names of some top consultants? I can…’

‘I’m fine. Look, it was a once off. It’s not going to happen again.’ I paused for a moment. ‘How did the meeting go?’

This time Van Loon paused. I was out on a limb now.

‘Well it was a little awkward, Eddie,’ he said eventually, ‘I’m not going to lie to you. I wished you’d been there.’

‘Did he seem convinced?’

‘In outline, yeah. He says he feels it’s something he can bring to the table, but you and me are going to have to sit down with him and go over the numbers.’

‘Great. Sure. Of course. Whenever.’

‘Hank’s gone to the coast, but he’ll be back in town on… Tuesday I think, yeah, so why don’t you come into the office some time on Monday and we can set something up.’

‘Great – and listen, Carl, I’m sorry again, I really am.’

‘You sure you don’t want to see my doctor? He’s-’

‘No, but thanks for the offer.’

‘Think about it.’

‘OK. I’ll see you on Monday.’

I remained standing by the phone for a couple of minutes after the call to Van Loon, staring down at an open page of my address book.

I had a nervous, jumpy feeling in my stomach.

Then I picked the phone up and dialled Melissa’s number. As I waited for her to answer I could have been back in Vernon’s apartment – up on the seventeenth floor, still at the beginning of all of this, still in those last shining moments before I recorded a message on her answering machine and then went rooting around in her brother’s bedroom…

‘Hello.’

‘Melissa?’

‘Eddie. Hi.’

‘I got your message.’

‘Yeah. Look… erm…’ – I got the impression that she was composing herself – ‘… what I said on the message, that just occurred to me today. I don’t know. My brother was an asshole. He’d been dealing this weird designer thing for quite a while. And it occurred to me about you. So I started worrying.’

If Melissa had been drinking earlier on in the day, she seemed subdued now, hungover maybe.

‘There’s nothing to worry about, Melissa,’ I said, having decided on the spot that this was what I was going to do. ‘Vernon didn’t give me anything. I’d met him the day before he… er… the day before it happened. And we just talked about stuff… nothing in particular.’

She sighed, ‘OK.’

‘But thanks for your concern.’ I paused for a moment. ‘How are you?’

‘I’m fine.’

Awkward, awkward, awkward.

Then she said, ‘How are you?’

‘I’m fine. Keeping busy.’

‘What have you been up to?’

This was the conversation we would be having in these circumstances – here it was – the inevitable conversation we would be having in these circumstances…

‘I’ve been working for the last few years as a copywriter.’ I paused. ‘For Kerr & Dexter. The publishers.’

It was the truth, technically, but that’s all it was.

‘Yeah? That’s great.’

It didn’t feel great, though – or like the truth, my days as a copywriter for Kerr & Dexter suddenly seeming distant, unreal, fictional.

I didn’t want to be on the phone to Melissa any more. Since we’d renewed our acquaintance – however fleetingly – I felt that I had already entered into a consistent pattern of lying to her. Going on with the conversation could only make that worse.

I said, ‘Look, I wanted to call you back and clear that up… but… I’m going to get off the phone now.’

‘OK.’

‘It’s not that-’

‘Eddie?’

‘Yes?’

‘This isn’t easy for me either.’

‘Sure.’

There wasn’t anything else I could think of to say.

‘Goodbye then.’

‘Bye.’

In need of immediate distraction, I flicked through my address book for Gennady’s cellphone number. I dialled it and waited.

‘Yeah?’

‘Gennady?’

‘Yeah.’

‘It’s Eddie.’

‘Eddie. What you want? I busy.’

I stared at the wall in front of me for a second.

‘I’ve got a treatment done for that thing. It’s about twen-’

‘Give me this in the morning. I look at it.’

‘Gennady…’ He was gone. ‘Gennady?’

I put the phone down.

Tomorrow morning was Friday. I’d forgotten. Gennady was coming for the first repayment on the loan.

Shit.

The money I owed wasn’t the problem. I could write him out a cheque straightaway for the whole amount, plus the vig, plus a bonus for just being Gennady, but that wouldn’t do it. I’d told him that I had a treatment ready. Now I had to come up with one, had to have one for the morning – or else he’d probably stab me continuously until he developed something akin to tennis elbow.

I wasn’t exactly in the mood for this sort of thing, but I knew it would keep me busy, so I went online and did some research. I picked up relevant terminology and worked out a plot loosely based on a recent mafia trial in Sicily, a detailed account of which I found on an Italian website. By some time after midnight – with suitable variations – I’d knocked out a twenty-five-page, scene-by-scene treatment for Keeper of the Code, a story of the Organizatsiya.

After that, I spent a good while searching through magazines for real estate ads. I had decided that I was going to phone some of the big Manhattan realtors the following morning and finally kickstart the process of renting – maybe even of buying – a new apartment.

Then I went to bed and got four or five hours of what passed for sleep these days.

Gennady arrived at about nine-thirty. I buzzed him in, telling him I was on the third floor. It took him for ever to walk up the stairs, and when he finally materialized in my living-room he seemed exhausted and fed up.

‘Good morning,’ I said.

He raised his eyebrows at me and looked around. Then he looked at his watch.

I had printed out the treatment and put it in an envelope. I took this from the desk and handed it to him. He held it up, shook it, seemed to be estimating how much it weighed. Then he said, ‘Where the money?’

‘Er… I was going to write you a cheque. How much was it again?’

‘A cheque?’

I nodded at him, suddenly feeling foolish.

‘A cheque?’ he said again. ‘You out of your fucking mind? What you think, we are a financial institution?’

‘Gennady, look-’

‘Shut up. You can’t come up with the money today you in serious fucking trouble, my friend – you hear me?’

‘I’ll get it.’

‘I cut your balls off.’

‘I’ll get it. Jesus. I wasn’t thinking.’

‘A cheque,’ he said again, with contempt. ‘Unbelievable.’

I went over to my phone and picked it up. Since those first couple of days at Lafayette, I had developed extremely cordial relations with my obsequious and florid-faced bank manager, Howard Lewis, so I phoned him and told him what I needed – twenty-two five in cash – and asked if he could possibly have it ready for me in fifteen minutes.

Absolutely no problem, Mr Spinola.

I put the phone down and turned around. Gennady was standing over at my desk, with his back to me. I mumbled something to get his attention. He then turned to face me.

‘Well?’

I shrugged my shoulders and said, ‘Let’s go to my bank.’

We took a cab, in silence, to Twenty-third and Second, where my bank was. I wanted to make a reference to the treatment, but since Gennady was obviously in a very bad mood, I judged it better not to say anything. I got the cash from Howard Lewis and handed it over to Gennady outside on the street. He slipped the bundle into the mysterious interior of his jacket. Holding up the envelope with the treatment in it, he said, ‘I look at this.’

Then he took off up Second Avenue without saying goodbye.

I crossed the street, and in line with my new strategy of trying to eat at least once a day, I went into a diner and had coffee and a blueberry muffin.

Then I wandered over to – and up – Madison Avenue. After about ten blocks, I stopped outside a realtor’s office, a place called Sullivan, Draskell. I went inside, made some enquiries and got talking to a broker by the name of Alison Botnick. She was in her late forties and was dressed in a stylish navy-blue silk dress with a matching Nehru coat. I realized pretty quickly that even though I was in jeans and a sweater, and could easily have been a clerk in a wine store – or a freelance copywriter – this woman had no idea who I was and consequently had to be on her guard. As far as Ms Botnick was concerned, I could have been one of those new dot-com billionaires on the look-out for a twelve-room spread on Park. These days you never knew, and I kept her guessing.

Walking up Madison, I had been thinking in the region of $300,000 for a place – $500,000 tops – but it occurred to me now that given my standing with Van Loon and my prospects with Hank Atwood there was no reason why I shouldn’t be thinking bigger – $2 million, $3 million, maybe even more. As I stood in the plush reception area of Sullivan, Draskell, thumbing through glossy brochures for luxury condos in new buildings called things like the Mercury and the Celestial, and listening to Alison Botnick’s pitch, with its urgent lexical hammer-blows – high-end, liquid, snapped-up, close, close, close – I felt my expectations rising by the second. I could also see Alison Botnick, for her part – as she morphed fifteen years off my frame and mentally dressed me in a UCLA T-shirt and baseball cap – convincing herself that I was a dot-com billionaire. The flames were stoked further when I casually shrugged off her suggestion that, given the storm of paperwork required these days to pass the average co-op board’s screening procedure, I would probably want to avoid a co-op apartment.

‘The boards are getting very picky,’ she said, ‘not that-’

‘Of course not, but who wants to be excluded without a fight?’

She assessed this.

‘OK.’

Our manipulation of each other into these respective states of acquisitive and professional arousal could only have led to one thing: viewings. She took me first to see a four-bedroom prewar co-op in the East Seventies between Lexington and Park. We went by cab, and as we chatted about the market and where it was ‘at’ right now, I had that pleasant sensation of being in control – and of being at the controls, as though I had designed the software for this little interlude myself and everything was running smoothly.

The apartment we went to view on Seventy-fourth was nothing special. It had low ceilings and didn’t have much natural light. It was also cramped and quite fussy.

‘A lot of these prewar co-ops are like this, you know,’ Alison said, as we made our way back down to the lobby. ‘They’ve got leaks and need to be rewired, and unless you’re prepared to just gut them and start over, they’re not worth the money.’

Which in this case was $1.8 million.

Next we went to see a 3,200-square-foot converted loft space in the Flatiron District. It had been a textile factory of some kind up until the’50s, had lain vacant for most of the’60s and from the way the place was decorated it didn’t look as if its present owner had made it much past the’70s. Alison said he was a civil engineer who’d probably paid very little for it, but was now asking $2.3 million. I liked it, and it certainly had potential, but it was huddled a little too anonymously in a part of town that was still relatively dull and unexciting.

The last place Alison took me to see was on the sixty-eighth floor of a condominium skyscraper that had just been built on the site of the old West Side rail yards. The Celestial, along with other luxury residential developments, was – in theory – to be the centrepiece of a new urban rejuvenation project. This would roughly cover the area between West Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen.

‘If you take a look at it, there’s a ton of empty lots there,’ Alison said, sounding like a latter-day Robert Moses, ‘from Twenty-sixth Street up to Forty-second Street, west of Ninth Avenue – it’s ripe for redevelopment. And with the new Penn Station you’ll have a huge increase in traffic – thousands more people pouring in every day.’

She was right, and as our cab cruised west along Thirty-fourth Street, down towards the Hudson River, I could see what she was talking about, I could see the great potential there was for gentrification, for a huge bourgeois-boho makeover of the entire neighbourhood.

‘Believe me,’ she went on, ‘it’s going to be the biggest land grab this city has seen in fifty years.’

Rising up out of the wasteland of disused and neglected warehouse buildings, the Celestial itself was a dazzling steel-frame monolith in a seamless casing of reflective bronze-tinted glass. As the cab pulled up alongside a huge plaza at the foot of the building, Alison started reeling off stuff that she obviously felt I should know. The Celestial was 715 feet tall, had 70 storeys and 185 apartments – also several restaurants, a health club, a private screening room, dog-walking facilities, a ‘smart garbage’ recycling system… wine-cellar, walk-in humidor, titanium-sided roofdeck…

I nodded at all of this, as though mentally jotting it down for later scrutiny.

‘The guy who designed this place,’ she said, ‘is even thinking of moving in himself.’

The vast lobby area had pink-veined marble columns supporting a gold-toned mosaic ceiling, but little in the way of furniture or art works. The elevator took us up to the sixty-eighth floor in what felt like ten seconds, but must have been longer. The apartment she was showing me still had some work to be done on it, so I wasn’t to mind the bare light bulbs and exposed wiring. ‘But…’ she turned to me and said in a whisper as she was putting the key in the door, ‘… check out the views…’

We stepped into an open, loft-style space, and although I was aware of various corridors going off in different directions, I was immediately drawn to the full-length windows on the far side of this bare, white room. There was plastic sheeting on the floor, and as I walked across it, Alison following just behind me, the whole of Manhattan rose dizzyingly up into view. Standing there at the window, I gaped out at the cluster of midtown skyscrapers directly ahead, at Central Park huddled up to the left, at the financial district over to my right.

Seen here from an angle that had a dreamlike quality of the impossible to it, all of the city’s land-mark buildings were in place – but they appeared to be facing, even somehow looking, in this direction.

I sensed Alison at my shoulder – smelled her perfume, heard the gentle swish of silk against silk as she moved.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘what do you think?’

‘It’s amazing,’ I said, and turned to look at her.

She was nodding in agreement, and smiling. Her eyes were a vivid green and glistened in a way that I hadn’t noticed before. In fact, Alison Botnick suddenly seemed a lot younger than I had imagined her to be.

‘So, Mr Spinola,’ she said, holding my gaze, ‘do you mind if I ask you what line of work you are in?’

I hesitated, and then said, ‘Investment banking.’

She nodded.

‘I work for Carl Van Loon.’

‘I see. That must be interesting.’

‘It is.’

As she processed this information, maybe slotting me into some real estate client category, I glanced around at the room with its bare walls and incomplete grid of ceiling panels, trying to imagine how it might look fully furnished, and lived in. I thought about the rest of the place, as well.

‘How many rooms are there?’ I asked.

‘Ten.’

I considered this for a moment – an apartment with ten rooms – but the scale of it defeated me. I was drawn irresistibly back to the window and gazed out again at the city – rapt as before, taking it all in. It was a clear, sunny day in Manhattan and just standing there made me feel utterly exhilarated.

‘What’s the ask price?’

I had the impression she was only doing it for effect, but Alison consulted her notebook, flicking through several pages and humming in concentration. After a moment, she said, casually, ‘Nine point five.’

I clicked my tongue and whistled.

She consulted another page in her notebook and then stepped a little over to the left, as though she were now positively lost in concentration.

I went back to looking out of the window. It was a lot of money, sure, but it wasn’t necessarily a prohibitive amount. If I continued trading at my current levels, and managed to play Van Loon the right way, there was no reason why I shouldn’t be able to put some kind of a financial package together.

I glanced back at Alison and cleared my throat.

She turned around, and smiled politely.

Nine and a half million dollars.

There’d been a certain amount of wattage in the air between us, but apparently the mention of money had somehow defused this and for the next while we wandered in silence through the other rooms of the apartment. The views and angles in each one were slightly different from those in the main room, but they were equally as spectacular. There seemed to be light everywhere, and space, and as I passed through what would be the bathrooms and the kitchen, I had swirling visions in my head of onyx, terracotta, mahogany, chrome – elegant living in a kaleidoscope of floating forms, parallel lines, designer curves…

At one point, I contrasted all of this with the cramped atmosphere and creaking floorboards of my one-bedroom apartment on Tenth Street and I immediately began to feel light-headed, constricted in my breathing, a little panicky even.

‘Mr Spinola, are you all right?’

I was leaning against a doorway now, with one hand pressed against my chest.

‘Yeah, I’m fine… it’s just…’

‘What?’

I looked up, and around, to get my bearings… unsure that I hadn’t had another momentary blackout. I didn’t think I’d moved – didn’t remember moving – but I couldn’t be 100 per cent certain that…

That what?

That from where I was standing, the angle wasn’t different…

‘Mr Spinola?’

‘I’m fine. I’m fine. I have to go now, though. I’m sorry.’

I started walking swiftly along the corridor towards the main entrance. With my back to her, I waved a hand in the air and said, ‘I’ll be in touch with your office. I’ll phone. Thank you.’

I got out into the hallway and straight over to one of the elevator cars.

I was hoping, as the doors whispered closed, that she wouldn’t follow me, and she didn’t.

16

I WALKED OUT OF THE CELESTIAL and across the plaza towards Tenth Avenue, keenly aware of the colossal rectangular slab of bronzetinted glass shimmering in the sun behind me. I was also aware of the possibility that Alison Botnick was still up on the sixty-eighth floor, and maybe even staring down at the plaza – which of course made me feel like an insect, and more so with each step I took. I had to walk several blocks along Thirty-third Street, past the General Post Office and Madison Square Garden, before finding a taxi. I never once looked back, and as I got settled into the cab I kept my head down. There was a copy of the New York Post lying folded on the seat beside me. I picked it up and held it tightly in my lap.

I still wasn’t sure if anything had happened back there, but the merest hint of that clicking business starting up again absolutely terrified me. I sat still and waited, gauging each flicker of perception, each breath, ready to isolate and assess anything out of the ordinary. A couple of minutes passed, and I seemed to be OK. I then relaxed my grip on the newspaper, and by the time we were turning right on to Second Avenue, I had calmed down considerably.

I flipped open the Post and looked at the front page. The headline was FEDS PROBE REGULATORS. It was a story about goings-on at the New York State Athletic Commission and was accompanied by extremely unflattering photos of two NYSAC officials. As usual in the Post, across the top of the front page, above the masthead, there were three boxed headlines with page references for the articles inside. The middle one, white type on a red background, immediately caught my eye. It said, MEX PAINTER’S WIFE IN BRUTAL ATTACK, page 2. I paused for a second, staring at the words, and was about to flick over to the story when I noticed the headline beside it. This one – white on black – said, MYSTERY TRADER CLEANS UP, page 43. I fumbled with the paper, trying to get it open, and when I eventually got to the article, which was in the business section, the first thing I saw was Mary Stern’s by-line.

My stomach started churning.

I couldn’t believe she’d gone ahead and written something about me, and especially after the way I’d spoken to her on the phone – but then maybe that was why. The text of the article took up half a page and was accompanied by a large photo of the Lafayette trading room. There were Jay Zollo and the others, swivelled around on their chairs, staring into the camera.

I started reading.

Something unusual has been going on in one of the day-trading houses down on Broad Street. In a room with fifty terminals and as many baseball caps, guerrilla marketmakers shave and scalp their way to tiny profit margins – an eighth of a point here, a sixteenth of a point there. It’s a hard graft at Lafayette Trading and the atmosphere is undeniably tense.

I was named in the second paragraph.

But last week all of that changed as new kid on the block, Eddie Spinola, walked in off the street, opened an account and launched straight into an aggressive short-selling spree that left seasoned traders in the Lafayette pit gasping for breath – and reaching for their keyboards, as they followed his leads and swept up profits unheard of in the day-trading world. But get this – undisputed King Rat by the end of his first week, mystery trader Eddie Spinola has since gone AWOL…

I couldn’t believe it. I skimmed the rest of the paragraph.

refuses to speak… cagey with fellow-traders… evasive… elusive… hasn’t been seen for days…

The article went on to speculate about who I was and what I might be up to, and included quotes from, among others, a baffled Jay Zollo. A sidebar gave details of trades I’d made and of how various Lafayette regulars had benefited – one guy making enough for a down-payment on an apartment, another booking himself in for some long overdue dental surgery, a third catching up on alimony arrears.

It was a strange feeling, being written about like this, seeing my name in print, in a newspaper, especially in the business section of a newspaper. It was even stranger that it should be in the business section of the New York Post.

I looked out at the traffic on Second Avenue.

I didn’t know what any of this meant – in terms of my privacy, or of my relationship with Van Loon, or of anything – but there was one thing I was sure of: I didn’t like it.

The cab pulled up at my building on Tenth Street. I was so distracted by the Post article that as I paid the driver and got out, I didn’t notice the small group of what I would soon realize were photographers and reporters gathered on the sidewalk. They didn’t know me, didn’t know what I looked like, presumably only knew where I lived – but when I got out of the cab and stood there, staring at them in disbelief, it must have been obvious who I was. There was a brief moment of calm before the penny dropped, a two-second delay at most, and then it was Eddie! Eddie! Here! Here! Click! Whirr! Click! I put my head down, got my key out and surged forward. When are you going back to Lafayette, Eddie? Look this way, Eddie! What’s your secret, Eddie? I managed to get inside the door and to slam it closed behind me. I rushed upstairs into my apartment and went straight over to the window. They were still down there, about five of them, clustered around the door of the building. Was this a result of the story in the Post? Everyone wanting to know about the guy who’d beaten the markets? The mystery trader? Well if that was news, I thought, it was just as well no one realized I was the Thomas Cole the police were so anxious to interview in connection with the Donatella Alvarez situation.

I turned back in towards the room.

The red light was flashing on my answering machine. I walked over to it, wearily, and pressed the ‘play’ button.

Seven messages.

I sat on the edge of the couch and listened. Jay Zollo, pleading with me to get in touch with him again. My father, puzzled, wanting to know if I’d seen that thing in the paper. Gennady, pissed, declaring that if I was yanking his chain he’d cut my fucking head off, and with a bread knife. Artie Meltzer, all pally, inviting me out to lunch. Mary Stern, telling me it’d be so much easier if I would just talk to her. A recruitment company, offering me an executive position in a major brokerage house. Someone from David Letterman’s office – a booking agent – saying if I agreed I could be on the show tonight.

I flopped back on to the couch and stared up at the ceiling. I had to stay calm. I certainly hadn’t wanted any of this attention or pressure, but if I was going to come through it in one piece, I really needed to keep my wits about me. I rolled off the couch, got up and went into the bedroom to lie down properly. Maybe if I could just sleep for part of the afternoon, for an hour or two, I might be able to think a bit more clearly. But the moment I lay down on the bed and stretched out I knew I wasn’t going to be able to do it. I was wide awake and my mind was racing.

I got up again and went into the living-room. I paced back and forth for a while – from the desk to the phone, from the phone to the desk. Then I went into the kitchen. Then out again. Then into the bathroom, then out again to the living-room. Then over to the window. Then back again. But that was it, there was nowhere else to go – just these three rooms. Standing near my desk, I surveyed the apartment and tried to imagine what the place would be like with ten rooms, and high ceilings, and bare white walls. But I couldn’t do it, not without getting dizzy. Besides, that was somewhere else – the sixty-eighth floor of the Celestial – and I was here now, in my apartment…

I stepped back from the desk, a little unsteadily, and leant against the bookshelves behind me. I felt queasy all of a sudden, and light-headed.

I closed my eyes.

After a moment, I found myself floating – moving along an empty, brightly lit corridor. Sound was distant and increasingly muffled. The forward motion seemed to continue for ages, the pace slow and dreamy. But then I was gliding around a broad curve, moving into and across a room, towards a wide, full-length window. I didn’t stop at the window, but floated on – arms outstretched – through the window and out above the vast microchip of the city, while behind me, after a brief but inexplicable delay, the huge plate of bronzetinted glass shattered deafeningly into a million pieces…

I opened my eyes – and jolted backwards, recoiling in fright from the unexpected aerial view I was now getting of the sidewalk down on Tenth Street, of the trash cans and parked cars and photographers’ heads milling around like bacteria in a lab dish. I pulled myself in from the window ledge, struggling to keep my balance, and slumped down on to the floor. Then, taking deep breaths and rubbing the top of my head – which I had banged against the upper section of the window – I stared over in amazement at where I had been a moment before… and still should have been…

I got up slowly and walked back across the room towards the bookshelves, closely observing each step. I reached out to touch things as I passed them, to reassure myself – the side of the couch, the table, the desk. I looked back at where I had come from, and couldn’t believe it. It didn’t seem real that I had been leaning out of that window, and leaning out so far…

With my heart still thumping, I went into the bathroom. If this thing was going to start up again, and develop, I had to find some way to stop it. I opened the medicine cabinet above the washbasin and quickly searched through all the bottles and packets and sealed containers, the accumulated toiletries, shaving things, soap products, non-prescription painkillers. I found a bottle of cough syrup I’d bought the previous winter but had never used. I scanned the label and saw that it contained codeine. I opened the cap, pausing for a second as I glanced at myself in the mirror, and then started chugging the stuff down. It was horrible, sickly and viscous, and I gagged between swallows, but at least I knew that whatever synaptic short-circuiting in my brain was causing these blackouts, the codeine would slow me down and make me drowsy, and probably sufficiently drowsy to keep me here, passed out on the couch or on the floor – I didn’t mind which, just so long as I wasn’t outside somewhere in the city, out and about and on the loose…

I emptied the bottle of its last drop, put the cap back on and threw it into the little basket beside the toilet. Then I had to steel myself against throwing up. I sat on the edge of the bathtub for a while, clutching the sides of it tightly, and stared at the wall opposite, afraid even to close my eyes.

Over the next five minutes, before the codeine kicked in, there were two more occurrences, both brief as flickers in a slideshow, but no less terrifying for that. From the edge of the bathtub, and with no conscious movement on my part, I found myself standing in the middle of the living-room. I stood there, swaying slightly, trying to act unfazed – as if ignoring what had happened might mean it wouldn’t happen again. Soon after that – click, click – I was half-way down the stairs, sitting on the bottom step of the first landing with my head in my hands. I realized that another trip-switch forward like that and I’d be outside on the street, being mobbed by photographers and reporters – maybe in danger, maybe a danger to others, certainly out of control…

But I could feel the onset now of a heaviness in my limbs and a kind of general spaciness. I stood up, grabbing on to the banisters for support, and turned around. I made my way slowly back up to the third floor. Walking now was like wading through treacle and by the time I got to the door of my apartment, which was wide open, I knew I wouldn’t be going anywhere.

It then took me a couple of moments, standing in the doorway, to realize that the ringing sound I was hearing wasn’t just in my head. It was the telephone, and before I’d had time to reason that I shouldn’t be answering the telephone, given my present state, I was watching my hand floating down to pick up the receiver and then floating back up again towards my head.

‘Hello.’

‘Eddie?’

I paused for a moment, in shock. It was Melissa.

‘Eddie?’

‘Yeah, it’s me. Sorry. Hi.’

My voice felt heavy, slack.

‘Eddie, why did you lie to me?’

‘I didn’t… wh-what are you talking about?’

‘MDT. Vernon. You know what I’m talking about.’

‘But-’

‘I’ve just been reading the Post, Eddie. Short-selling stocks? Second-guessing the markets? You? Come on.’

I didn’t know what to say. Eventually, I came up with, ‘Since when do you read the New York Post?’

‘These days the Post’s about all I can read.’

What did that mean?

‘I don’t under-’

‘Look, Eddie, forget the Post, forget the fact that you lied to me. MDT is the problem. Are you still taking it?’

I didn’t answer. I could barely keep my eyelids open.

‘You’ve got to stop taking it. Jesus.’

I paused again, but had no clear sense this time of how long the pause went on for.

‘Eddie? Talk to me.’

‘OK…

Now she paused, and then said, ‘Fine, when?’

‘You tell me.’

When I spoke, my tongue felt thick and swollen.

‘Tomorrow. In the morning. I don’t know – eleven-thirty, twelve?’

‘OK. In the city?’

‘Fine. Where?’

I suggested a bar on Spring Street.

‘Fine.’

That was it. Then Melissa said, ‘Eddie, are you OK? You sound strange. I’m worried.’

I was staring down at a knot in one of the floorboards. I rallied all of my strength and managed, ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, Melissa.’

Then, without waiting for an answer, I put the phone down.

I staggered over to the couch and lowered myself on to it. It was the middle of the afternoon and I’d just drunk a whole bottle of cough syrup. I laid my head on the armrest and stared up at the ceiling. Over the next half an hour or so, I was aware of various sounds drifting in and out of my consciousness – the door-buzzer, possibly someone banging on the door, voices, the phone ringing, sirens, traffic. But none of it was clear enough, or compelling enough, to rouse me from the torpor I was in, and gradually I sank into the deepest sleep I’d had for weeks.

17

OUT COLD UNTIL FOUR O’CLOCK the next morning, I spent a further two hours struggling to emerge from the other side of this paralysing blanket of drowsiness. Some time after six, aching all over, I dragged myself off the couch and slouched into the bathroom. I had a shower. Then I went into the kitchen and put on a large pot of coffee.

Back in the living-room, smoking a cigarette, I found myself glancing continually over at the ceramic bowl on the shelf above the computer. But I didn’t want to get too close to it, because I knew that if I went on taking MDT, I would just end up having more of these mysterious and increasingly scary blackouts. On the other hand, I didn’t really believe that I’d had anything to do with putting Donatella Alvarez into a coma in the first place. I was prepared to accept that something had happened, and that during these blackouts I continued functioning on one level or another, moving about, doing stuff, but I refused to accept that this extended to me striking someone over the head with a blunt instrument. I’d had a similar thought a few minutes earlier in the bathroom, while I was having my shower. There were still bruises on my body, as well as that small circular mark, fading now, of what had seemed to be a cigarette burn. This was incontrovertible evidence, I’d concluded, of something, but hardly of anything to do with me…

I wandered reluctantly over to the window and looked out. The street was empty. There was no one around – there were no photographers, no reporters. With any luck, I thought, the mystery trader of the tabloids had already become yesterday’s news. Besides, it was Saturday morning and things were bound to be a little quieter.

I sat on the couch again. After a couple of minutes, I got back into the position I’d been in all night, and even started to doze a little. I felt pleasantly drowsy now, and kind of lazy. This was something I hadn’t felt for ages, and although it took me a while, I eventually linked it in with the fact that I hadn’t taken an MDT pill in nearly twenty-four hours, my longest – and only – period of abstinence since the beginning. It had never occurred to me before to just stop, but now I thought – well, why not? It was the weekend, and maybe I deserved a break. I would need to be charged up for the meeting with Carl Van Loon on Monday, but until then there was no reason why I shouldn’t be able to chill out like a regular person.

However, by eleven o’clock I didn’t feel quite so relaxed about things, and as I was getting ready to go out a vague sense of disorientation crept over me. But since I’d never really given myself the chance to let the drug wear off properly, I decided to stick to my plan of temporary abstinence – at least until I’d spoken to Melissa.

Down on Spring Street I left the sunlight behind me and stepped into the dim shadows of the bar where we’d arranged to meet. I looked around. Someone gestured to me from a booth in the corner, a raised hand, and although I couldn’t see the person clearly from where I was standing, I knew that it had to be Melissa. I walked over towards her.

On my way to this place from Tenth Street, I’d felt very weird indeed, as if I had taken something after all and was coming up on it. But I knew it was actually the reverse, that it was more like a curtain being lifted on raw, exposed nerves, on feelings that hadn’t seen the light of day for some time. When I thought about Carl Van Loon, for example, or Lafayette, or Chantal, I was first struck by how unreal they seemed, and then by a kind of retrospective terror at my involvement with them. When I thought about Melissa, I was overwhelmed – blinded by a pixel-storm of memories…

She half got up as I arrived and we kissed awkwardly. She sat back down on her side of the booth. I slid into the opposite side to face her.

My heart was pounding.

I said, ‘How are you doing?’ and it immediately seemed odd to me that I wasn’t commenting on how she looked, because she looked so different.

‘I’m OK.’

Her hair was short and dyed a kind of reddish brown. She was heavier – generally, but especially in the face – and had lines around her eyes. These made her look very tired. I was one to talk, of course, but that didn’t make it any less of a shock.

‘So, Eddie, how are you?’

‘I’m OK,’ I lied, and then added, ‘I suppose.’

Melissa was drinking a beer and had a cigarette on the go. The place was almost empty. There was an old man reading a newspaper at a table near the door and there were two young guys on stools at the bar. I caught the eye of the barman and pointed at Melissa’s beer. He nodded back at me. The normality of this little routine belied how strange and unsettled I was feeling. A few weeks earlier I’d been sitting opposite Vernon in a booth of a cocktail lounge on Sixth Avenue. Now, thanks to some unaccountable dream-logic, I was sitting in a booth opposite Melissa in this place.

‘You look good,’ she said. Then, holding up an admonitory finger, she added, ‘And don’t tell me I look good, because I know I don’t.’

It occurred to me that despite the changes – the weight, the lines, the weariness – nothing could eradicate the fact that Melissa was still beautiful. But after what she’d said I couldn’t think of any way to tell her this without sounding patronizing. What I said was, ‘I’ve lost quite a bit of weight recently.’

Looking me straight in the eyes, she replied, ‘Well, MDT will certainly do that to you.’

‘Yeah, I suppose it will.’

In as quiet and circumspect a voice as I could muster, I then asked, ‘So, what do you know about all of this?’

‘Well,’ she said, taking a deep breath, ‘here’s the bottom line, Eddie. MDT is lethal, or can be, and if it doesn’t kill you, it’ll do serious damage to your brain, and I’m talking about permanently.’ She then pointed to her own head with the index finger of her right hand, and said, ‘It fucked my brain up – which I’ll go into later – but the point I want to make now is, I was one of the lucky ones.’

I swallowed.

The barman appeared with a tray. He placed a glass of beer down in front of me and exchanged the ashtray on the table with a clean one. When he’d gone, Melissa continued. ‘I only took nine or ten hits, but there was one guy who took a lot more than that, over a period of weeks, and I know he died. Another unfortunate shmoe ended up as a vegetable. His mother had to sponge him down every day and feed him with a spoon.’

My stomach was jumping now, and a mild headache had started up.

‘When was this?’

‘About four years ago.’ She paused. ‘Vernon didn’t tell you any of this stuff?’ I shook my head. She seemed surprised. Then, as though great physical effort were required for what she was doing, she took a deep breath. ‘OK,’ she went on, ‘so about four years ago Vernon was hanging out with a client of his who worked at some pharmaceutical plant and had access that he shouldn’t have had to a whole range of new drugs. One of them in particular, which didn’t have a name yet and hadn’t been tested, was supposed to be… amazing. So, in order to test it, because of course they were too goddamned shrewd to test it themselves, Vernon and this guy started getting people – their friends basically – to take it.’

‘Even you?’

‘Vernon didn’t want me to take it at first, but he talked it up so much that I insisted. You know what I was like, curious to a fault.’

‘It wasn’t a fault.’

‘Anyway, a few of us found ourselves in on this – I don’t know – let’s call it an informal trial period.’ She paused and took a sip from her beer. ‘So what do you want, I took it and it was amazing.’ She paused again, and looked at me for confirmation. ‘I mean, you’ve taken it, you know what I’m talking about, right?’

I nodded.

‘Well. I did it a few more times and then I got scared.’

‘Why?’

‘Why? Because… I wasn’t stupid. I knew no one could maintain that level of mental activity for very long and survive. It was nonsense. Let me give you an example, one day I read Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe… superstring theory, yeah? I read it in forty-five minutes, and understood it.’ She took a last drag from her cigarette. ‘Don’t ask me about it now, though.’ She stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray. ‘Then I had this thing I was supposed to be working on at the time, a series of articles about self-organizing adaptive systems – the research that’s been done into them, their wider applicability, whatever. My work-rate increased ten-fold overnight, I’m not kidding you. My boss at Iroquois magazine thought I was pitching for his job as Features Editor. So I guess I just chickened out. I panicked. I couldn’t handle it. I stopped taking it.’

She shrugged her shoulders a couple of times.

‘And?’

‘And – eh – I started getting sick, after a few weeks, headaches, nausea. Talk about panic. I went back to Vernon to see if I maybe shouldn’t take another hit, or half a hit, see if that would make any difference. But that was when he told me about this other guy who’d just died.’

‘How had he died?’

‘Rapid two-day deterioration – headaches, dizziness, loss of motor skills, blackouts. Boom. He was dead.’

‘How much had he taken?’

‘One hit every day for about a month.’

I swallowed again and closed my eyes for a second.

‘How much have you been taking, Eddie?’

She was looking directly at me now, with those remarkable deep brown eyes. She was biting on her lower lip.

‘I’ve been taking a lot.’ I clicked my tongue. ‘More than that guy.’

‘Jesus.’

There was a long pause.

‘So you must still have a supply, then,’ she said eventually.

‘Not exactly, I’ve got some left, a stash, but… I got it from Vernon. He supplied it to me and now he’s gone. I don’t know anyone else.’

She looked at me, slightly puzzled. Then she said, ‘That guy I told you about died because they didn’t know what they were doing, they had no idea about dosage or strength, or anything – and as well, people reacted to it differently. But it didn’t take them long to work all of that stuff out.’ She paused, took in another deep breath, and continued. ‘Vernon was making a lot of money dealing MDT, and I haven’t heard of anyone else dying since the early days, so presumably whatever he gave you or told you was right for you. I mean, the dosage was worked out, right? You do know what you’re doing?’

‘Hmm.’

Did I tell her at this point that Vernon had only given me a sampler, and that he hadn’t had a chance to tell me anything?

What I said was, ‘So what happened with you, Melissa?’

She lit up another cigarette and seemed to be considering for a moment whether or not she was going to let me sidetrack her.

I took a cigarette, too.

Then she began. ‘Well, naturally after me getting sick and that guy dying I didn’t go near it again, I didn’t touch it. But I was really scared. I mean I was married and had two small kids.’ When she said this, she almost flinched, as though reacting to a threatened slap in the face – as though she felt that articulating this level of irresponsibility should instantly have provoked a violent reaction from someone. After a moment, she went on. ‘Anyway, it never seemed to get much worse than bad headaches and occasional nausea. But over a period of months I noticed a pattern. I couldn’t concentrate on anything for longer than ten minutes at a stretch without getting a migraine. I missed deadlines. I became sluggish, lazy. I put on weight.’ She pulled contemptuously at her sweater. ‘My memory was shot to bits. That series of articles? Forget it – the whole thing just disintegrated. Iroquois magazine let me go. The marriage fell apart. Sex? Get out of here.’ She leant back and shook her head. ‘That was four years ago and I haven’t been the same since.’

‘And now?’

‘Now I live in Mahopac and waitress four nights a week at a place called Cicero’s. Now I can’t read any more – I mean, what, the fucking New York Post?’

I felt as though sulphuric acid were being secreted into the pit of my stomach.

‘I can’t deal with stressful or emotional situations any more, Eddie. I’m wired up now because I’m seeing you, but after this meeting I’m going to have a headache for three days. Believe me, I’m going to pay dearly for this.’

She half stood up and eased her way out of the booth.

‘And I’ve got to pee. Which is another thing.’ She stood there, looking down at me, one hand scratching the back of her head. ‘But Jesus, you don’t need to know about that, right?’

Waving an arm dismissively, Melissa walked off towards the bathroom.

I gazed out across the bar now, reeling from what she’d told me, barely able to comprehend it. First of all, it seemed incredible to me that we were actually in the same place together, sharing a drink, talking – and that right now she was over there in the bathroom, in jeans and a baggy sweater, peeing. Because any time I’d thought of her over the past ten years, the person I’d automatically visualized had been the thin shiny Melissa of circa 1988, the one with long black hair and prominent cheekbones, the Melissa I’d seen hike up her skirt a thousand times and pee and continue talking about whatever she’d been talking about. But the Melissa of those days, apparently, had unravelled in time and space and was a ghost now. I was never going to see her again, never going to bump into her in the street. She’d been supplanted by the Melissa I hadn’t kept up with, the one who’d gotten married again and had kids, who’d worked for Iroquois magazine, the one who’d allowed her teeming, tumultuous brain to be damaged, and permanently so, by some untried, untested and previously unknown pharmaceutical product…

Before long, tears were gathering behind my eyes and I could feel a rawness in my throat. Then my hands started shaking. What was happening to me? It’d only been something like twenty-four hours since I’d taken my last dose of MDT and already it seemed that small cracks were appearing on the hard chemical shell that had formed around me in recent weeks. Seeping through these cracks, in turn, were some strong emotions, and I wasn’t sure how well I was going to be able to handle them. I pictured myself crying, sobbing, crawling across the floor, climbing up the walls, all of which seemed to make perfect sense for a while, as though it would be an exquisite relief. But then in the next moment Melissa was on her way back from the bathroom and I had to make some kind of an effort to pull myself together.

She sat down opposite me again and said, ‘You OK?’

I nodded, ‘I’m fine.’

‘You don’t look fine?’

‘It’s just… I’m happy to see you again, Melissa, I really am. But I feel so bad about… you know… I mean, I can’t believe that you’ve…’

The tears I’d been trying to hold back came into my eyes at this point. I clenched my fists and stared down at the table. ‘Sorry,’ I said, after a moment, and then smiled – but the expression on my face was probably so demented that it didn’t come across as a smile. I said ‘sorry’ again and as I wiped my eyes with one hand, I ground the knuckles of the other one into the surface of the wooden bench I was sitting on.

Without looking directly at her, I could tell that Melissa was now engaged in a damage limitation exercise of her own, one which involved taking deep breaths and whispering the word shit to herself every couple of seconds.

‘Look, Eddie,’ she said eventually, ‘this isn’t about me anymore, or about us – it’s about you.’

That statement had a steadying effect on me and I tried to focus on the implications of it for a moment.

She went on, ‘The reason I called you was because I thought… I don’t know, I thought if you were doing MDT, or had done it, that you should at least know what had happened to me. But I’d no idea you were so…’ she shook her head, ‘… involved. And then when I read that thing in the Post…’

I looked down into my glass of beer. I hadn’t touched it and didn’t think I was going to.

‘I mean, day-trading? Short-selling biotech stocks? I just couldn’t believe it. You must be doing a lot of MDT.’

I nodded, in tacit agreement.

‘But what happens when your supply runs out, Eddie? That’s when the real trouble’s going to start.’

Almost thinking aloud, I said, ‘Maybe I could stop taking it now. Or I could try weaning myself off it.’ I paused briefly to consider these options, but then said, ‘Of course there’s no guarantee that by doing either of those things I’d be doing the right thing, right?’

‘No,’ she said, looking quite pale and tired all of a sudden, ‘but I wouldn’t just stop. Not outright. That’s what I did. You see, it’s about dosage – how much you take, when you take it. That’s what they worked out after I started getting sick, and after that other guy died.’

‘So I should cut down? I should cut back?’

‘I don’t know. I think so. Jesus, I can’t believe that Vernon didn’t tell you about any of this stuff.’

I could see that she was puzzled. My story – or what she knew of it so far – obviously made very little sense.

‘Melissa, Vernon never told me anything.’

As I said this, I realized that for my story to make sense – without being the full truth – I was going to have to lie to her, and in a fairly elaborate way. Certain obvious and very awkward questions naturally posed themselves at this point, and I was dreading her asking them – questions such as: How many times had I actually seen Vernon? How had I come to have such a large supply of MDT? Why hadn’t I bothered to find out more about it? But to my surprise, Melissa didn’t put any of these questions to me, or any others for that matter, and we both fell silent for a while.

I studied her face as she lit up another cigarette. I would have expected the Melissa I’d known ten years before to pursue me on every point here, to seek clarification, to have me piece it all together for her. But the woman sitting opposite me now had clearly run out of that kind of steam. I could see that she was curious, and wanted to know why I wasn’t being straight with her, but on another level it was also plain that she didn’t have the time or energy for this sort of thing any more. Vernon was dead. She’d said her piece to me about MDT. She was undeniably concerned about my predicament. But what else could she do or say? She had two kids at home and a life to cope with that was radically different from anything she might ever have envisaged for herself, or felt entitled to. She was tired.

I was on my own.

Melissa looked up at me. ‘I’m sorry, Eddie.’

‘One question,’ I said, ‘that client of Vernon’s you mentioned? The one who worked for the pharmaceutical plant? I suppose I should be talking to him? That would make sense, wouldn’t it?’ But I immediately saw from the expression on her face that she wasn’t going to be able to help me out.

‘I only met him once, Eddie – four years ago. I don’t remember his name. Tom something – or Todd. That’s the best I can do. I’m really sorry.’

I began to feel panicky now.

‘What about the police investigation?’ I said, ‘No one ever got back in touch with me after that first day. Did they get in touch with you? I mean – did they find out who killed Vernon, and why?’

‘No, but they knew he’d been a coke-dealer at one point, so I guess they’re working on the assumption that it was… a coke thing.’

I paused here, a little thrown by the phrase, ‘a coke thing’. After a moment of reflection, and with the merest hint of sarcasm in my voice, I repeated it, ‘a coke thing’. This was a phrase Melissa had once used to describe our marriage. She picked up on the reference immediately and seemed to deflate even further.

‘That still rankles, does it?’

‘Not really, but… it wasn’t a coke thing-’

‘I know that. Me making the comment was.’

I could have said a hundred different things in response to that, but all I could come up with was, ‘It was a strange time.’

‘That’s true.’

‘Whenever I look back on it now – I don’t know – it feels…’

‘What?’

‘It’s futile thinking about it, but there’s so much of it that I would do differently.’

The obvious follow-up question – like what? – hung in the air between us for a moment or two. Then Melissa said, ‘So would I.’

She was visibly drained now, and my headache was getting worse, so I decided it was time to extricate us both from the embarrassment and pain of a fraught conversation we’d wandered into carelessly, and which, if we didn’t watch it, could lead us into messy and very complicated territory.

Bracing myself, I then asked her to tell me something about her children. It transpired that she had two daughters, Ally, eight, and Jane, six. They were great, she said, I’d love them – quick-witted, strong-willed tyrants who didn’t miss a trick.

That was it, I thought, enough – I had to get out of there.

We spent a few more minutes chatting and then we brought it to a close. I promised Melissa that I’d keep in touch, that I’d let her know how I was getting on and that maybe I’d even come up someday to see her and the girls in Mahopac. She wrote down her address on a piece of paper, which I looked at and put into the pocket of my shirt.

Seeming to draw on some final reserve of energy, Melissa then held my gaze and said, ‘Eddie, what are you going to do about this?’

I told her I wasn’t sure, but that I’d be OK, that I had quite a few MDT pills left and consequently had plenty of room to manoeuvre. I would cut down gradually and see how that worked out. I’d be fine. Since I hadn’t mentioned anything to her about the blackouts, however, this felt like a lie. But I didn’t think that under the circumstances Melissa would notice.

She nodded. Maybe she had noticed – but again, even if she had, what could she do?

Outside on Spring Street we said goodbye and embraced. Melissa got a taxi to Grand Central Station and I walked back to Tenth Street.

18

THE FIRST THING I DID when I got into the apartment was take a couple of Extra-Strength Excedrin tablets for my headache. Then I lay on the couch and stared up at the ceiling, hoping that the pain – which was concentrated behind my eyes and had got steadily worse on the walk home from Spring Street – would subside quickly and then fade away altogether. I didn’t often get headaches, so I wasn’t sure if this one had come about as a result of my conversation with Melissa, or if it was a symptom of my sudden withdrawal from MDT. Either way – and both explanations seemed plausible at the time – I found it extremely unsettling.

In addition to this, the cracks that had been appearing and multiplying since morning were now being prised apart even wider, and left exposed, like open wounds. Again and again, I went over Melissa’s story, my thoughts vacillating between horror at what had happened to her and fear about what might be happening to me. I was haunted by the notion of how easily and irreversibly a careless decision, a mood, a whim, can change the direction of a person’s life. I thought about Donatella Alvarez and found it harder than before to simply dismiss the idea that I’d been in any way responsible for what had happened to her – for the easy, irreversible way her life had changed. I thought about my time with Melissa, and worried, agonized, about those things I might have done differently.

But this was clearly an intolerable situation. I had to take some action soon, or before I knew it I’d be getting sick – sliding into a clinical swamp, developing a whole syndrome of conditions, passing some awful point of no return. So at the very first glimmer of relief from the Excedrin – and this was only the merest dulling of the pain – I got up from the couch and started walking around the apartment, vigorously, as though in some literal sense trying to shake myself into good health.

Then I remembered something.

I went into the bedroom and over to the closet. Trying to ignore the throbbing in my head, I bent down and pulled out the old shoe-box from under the blanket and the pile of magazines. I opened it and lifted out the big brown envelope where I’d hidden the cash and pills. I put my hand into the envelope and felt around, ignoring the sealed plastic bag containing the more than 350 pills that were still left. What I was searching for was the other thing I’d hidden in the envelope – Vernon’s tiny black notebook.

When I found it, I started thumbing my way through it page by page. There were dozens of names and phone numbers in it, quite a few of which had been crossed out, sometimes with new numbers written in above or below the old ones. I recognized Deke Tauber’s name this time, and I vaguely recognized a few other names, but annoyingly – and I checked several times – I didn’t find anyone listed in the notebook whose name was Tom or Todd.

But still, there had to be someone in amongst all these names who could help me, someone I could contact and maybe get some information from.

After all, I thought, who were these people?

Obvious as it was, and even though I’d had the notebook lying in my closet for weeks, it only dawned on me now – this, of course, had been Vernon’s list of clients.

The realization that these people had all used MDT at one time or another, and were maybe still using it, came as quite a shock to me. It also bruised my ego a little, because although it was clearly irrational to think that no one besides myself had ever ex perienced the amazing effects of MDT, I nevertheless felt that my experience of it was in some way unique and more authentic than that of anyone else who might have tried it. This slightly indignant sense of ownership lingered in my mind as I read through the names in the notebook one more time, but then something else of significance occurred to me. If all of these people were on MDT, then surely that meant it had to be possible to do MDT without succumbing to headaches or blackouts, not to mention permanent brain damage.

I took another two Excedrin tablets and continued studying the notebook. The more I looked at the names the more familiar some of them seemed, until eventually about half of them had emerged from their earlier obscurity and I started being able to place them. A lot of the names that I recognized were from the business world, people who worked for new or medium-sized companies. There were several writers and journalists, and a couple of architects. Apart from Deke Tauber, none of these people was particularly well-known to the public at large. They all enjoyed some small measure of celebrity, but would be much better-known in their specific fields, so I decided it might be useful to do a little background research into some of them. I booted up my computer and went online.

Deke Tauber was the obvious one to start with. He had been a bond salesman on Wall Street in the mid-1980s – making lots of money, but spending considerably more. One or other of the Gants had known him in college, so he was often around, at parties, in bars, at openings, wherever there was premium quality blow to be had. I’d met him once or twice and found him to be arrogant and fairly objectionable. After the crash in 1987, however, he lost his job, moved out to California and that appeared to be the end of him.

Then about three years ago Tauber showed up in New York again, leading a dubious self-improvement cult – Dekedelia – that he had set up in LA. After a slow start, Dekedelia’s membership grew dramatically and Tauber started producing best-selling books and videos. He set up his own software company, opened a chain of cybercafés and moved into real estate. Soon, Dekedelia was a multimillion dollar business, employing over two hundred people, most of whom were also cult members.

When I trawled through what information I’d managed to find on other people named in Vernon’s client list, I saw the first of two distinct patterns emerging. In each case I looked at, there was – over the previous three or four years – a sudden and unexplained leap forward in the career of the person concerned. Take Theodore Neal. After two decades of churning out unauthorized showbiz biographies and hack magazine work, Neal suddenly produced a brilliant and compelling life of Ulysses S. Grant. Described as ‘a breathtaking and original work of scholarship’, it went on to win the National Book Critics Circle Award. Or Jim Rayburn, the chief of struggling record-label, Thrust, who in one six-month period discovered and signed up hip-hop artists J. J. Rictus, Human Cheese and F Train – and then within another six months had a full mantelpiece of Grammy and MTV awards to his name.

There were others – middle management grunts fast-tracking it to CEO, defence attorneys mesmerizing juries to achieve unlikely acquittals, architects designing elaborate new skyscrapers over lunch, on the backs of cocktail napkins…

It was bizarre, and through the band of pain pulsating behind my eyes I had only one thought: MDT-48 was out there in society. Other people were using it in the same way that I’d been using it. What I didn’t know was how much they were taking, and how often. I’d been taking MDT indiscriminately, one, two, occasionally even three at a pop, but I had no idea if I really needed that many, and if taking that many actually rendered the hit more intense or made it last any longer. It was like with cocaine, I supposed, in that after a while it was just a question of gluttony. Sooner or later, if the drug was there, gluttony became the controlling dynamic in your relationship to it.

So the only way I was going to find out about dosage was to contact someone on the list – just phone them up and ask them what they knew. It was when I did this that the second and more disturbing pattern began to emerge.

I put it off until the following day – because of my headache, because I was reluctant to call up people I didn’t know, because I was scared of what I might find out. I kept popping Excedrin tablets every few hours, and although they took the edge off the pain, there was still a dull and fairly constant thumping sensation behind my eyes.

I didn’t imagine I’d have any luck getting through to Deke Tauber, so the first name I selected from the list was that of a CFO in a medium-sized electronics company. I remembered his name from an article I’d read in Wired.

A woman answered the phone.

‘Good morning,’ I said, ‘may I speak to Paul Kaplan, please?’

The woman didn’t respond, and in the brief silence that followed I considered the possibility that we’d been disconnected. To check, I said, ‘Hello?’

‘Who is this, please?’ she said, her tone both weary and impatient.

‘I’m a journalist,’ I said, ‘from Electronics Today magaz-’

‘Look… my husband died three days ago.’

‘Oh-’

My mind froze. What did I say now? There was silence. It seemed to go on for ever. I eventually said, ‘I’m very sorry.’

The woman remained silent. I could hear muffled voices in the background. I wanted to ask her how her husband had died, but I was unable to form the words.

Then she said, ‘I’m sorry… thank you… goodbye.’

And that was that.

Her husband had died three days ago. It didn’t necessarily mean anything. People died all the time.

I selected another number and dialled it. I waited, staring at the wall in front of me.

‘Yes?’

A man’s voice.

‘May I speak to Jerry Brady, please?’

‘Jerry’s in…’ He paused, and then said, ‘who’s this?’

I’d chosen the number at random and realized now that I didn’t know who Jerry Brady was – or who I should be, calling him up on a Sunday morning like this.

‘It’s… a friend.’

The man hesitated, but then went on, ‘Jerry’s in the hospital…’ – there was a slight shake in his voice – ‘… and he’s really sick.’

‘Oh my god. That’s awful. What’s wrong with him?’

‘That’s just it, we don’t know. He started getting these headaches a couple of weeks ago? Then last Tuesday – no… Wednesday – he collapsed at work…’

‘Shit.’

‘… and when he came to he said he’d been having dizzy spells and muscular spasms all day. He’s been in and out of consciousness ever since, trembling, throwing up.’

‘What have the doctors said?’

‘They don’t know. I mean, what do you want, they’re doctors. All the tests they’ve done so far have been inconclusive. I’ll tell you something, though…’

He paused here, and clicked his tongue. I got the impression from his slightly breathless tone that he was dying to talk to someone but at the same time couldn’t quite ignore the fact that he had no idea who I was. For my part I wondered who he was – a brother? A lover?

I said, ‘Yeah? Go on…’

‘OK, here’s the thing,’ he said, obviously judging it immaterial at this stage of the proceedings who the fuck I was, ‘Jerry’d been weird for weeks, even before the headaches. Like he was really preoccupied with something, and worried. Which wasn’t Jerry’s style at all.’ He paused for a beat. ‘Oh my god I said wasn’t.’

I felt faint and put my free hand up to lean against the wall.

‘Look,’ I said quickly, ‘I’m not going to take up any more of your time. Just give Jerry my best, would you?’ Without saying my name, or anything else, I put the phone down.

I staggered back towards the couch and fell on to it. I lay there for about half an hour, horrified, replaying the two conversations over and over in my mind.

I eventually got up and dragged myself back to the telephone. There were between forty and fifty names in the notebook and so far I’d only called two of them. I picked another number – and then another one, and then another one after that.

But it was the same story each time. Of the people I tried to contact, three were dead and the remainder were sick – either already in the hospital, or in varying states of panic at home. In other circumstances, this might have constituted a mini-epidemic, but given that these people displayed quite a wide range of symptoms – and were spread out over Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens and Long Island – it was unlikely that anyone would make a connection between them. In fact, the only thing that did connect them, as far as I could see, was the presence of their phone numbers in this little notebook.

Sitting on the couch again, massaging my temples, I stared up at the ceramic bowl on the wooden shelf above the computer. I had no choice now. If I didn’t go back on MDT, this headache would intensify and soon be joined by other symptoms, the ones I’d repeatedly heard described on the telephone – dizziness, nausea, muscular spasms, impairment of motor skills. And then, apparently, I would die. It certainly looked as if all the people on Vernon’s client list were going to die, so why should I be any different?

But there was a difference, and a significant one. I could go back on MDT if I chose to. And they couldn’t. I had a fairly substantial stash of MDT. And they didn’t. Forty or fifty people were out there suffering severe and very probably lethal withdrawal symptoms because their supply had dried up.

And mine hadn’t.

In fact, mine had only started, because clearly their supply – or what would have been their supply if Vernon hadn’t died – was the stuff I’d been taking for the past few weeks. I had dreadful guilt feelings about this, but what could I do? There were over three hundred and fifty pills left in my closet, which gave me considerable breathing space, but if I were to share these out among fifty other people no one would benefit. Instead of us all dying this week, we’d all die next week.

In any case I decided that if I drastically reduced my own intake of MDT, it would have the effect of prolonging my supply, and might also, possibly, stop the blackouts, or at least curtail them.

I got up and went over to the desk. I stood for a moment, gazing at the ceramic bowl on the shelf, but before I even reached out to touch it I knew that something wasn’t right. I had a sense of fore-boding, of alarm. I took the bowl in my left hand and looked into it. The alarm quickly turned to panic.

Unbelievably, there were only two tablets left in the bowl.

Very slowly, almost as if I’d forgotten how to move, I sat down in the chair at my desk.

I’d put ten tablets into the bowl a couple of days before, and I’d only taken three of them out since then. So where were the other five?

I felt dizzy, and gripped the side of the chair to steady myself.

Gennady.

When I’d finished on the phone with my bank manager the other day, Gennady had been standing here at the desk, with his back to me.

Could he have taken some of the tablets?

It didn’t seem possible, but I racked my brains trying to visualize what had gone on, what the exact sequence of movements had been. And then I remembered – when I’d picked up the phone to call Howard Lewis, I’d turned my back on him.

A couple of minutes drifted by, during which the mind-bending notion of Gennady on MDT sank in. How long would it be, I thought, before the stuff made its way on to the streets, before someone worked out just what it was, reproduced it, gave it a marketable name and started dealing it in clubs, in the backs of cars, on street corners… micro-doses cut with speed at ten bucks a pop…? I didn’t really imagine things would go that far, I suppose – not yet, not if Gennady only had five doses. But given the nature of the MDT hit, it would be safe to assume that once he’d tried it out the first time he’d be unlikely to exercise much restraint with the rest of it. He’d also be unlikely to forget where he’d come across the stuff in the first place.

I took one of the two tiny pills out of the bowl and using a blade divided it neatly in half. I swallowed one of the halves. Then I just sat at the desk, thinking about how my situation had changed so radically over the previous three or four days, how it had started to fall apart at the seams, to convulse and haemorrhage and slip towards the recurring, the chronic, the terminal.

Then, about twenty minutes after that again, in the slipstream of this downward moodswing, I noticed out of the blue that my headache had lifted completely.

19

FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS, therefore, I only took half a pill each morning with breakfast. This dosage brought me as close to ‘normal’ as it was probably possible to get under the circumstances. I was apprehensive at first, but when the headaches didn’t come back, I relaxed somewhat and allowed myself to think I might have found a way out, or, at the very least – with a stash of nearly seven hundred such doses in prospect – plenty of time in which to look for a way out.

But of course it wasn’t that simple.

I slept until nine o’clock on the Monday morning. I had oranges, toast and coffee for breakfast, followed by a couple of cigarettes. Then I had a shower and got dressed. I put on my new suit – which wasn’t that new any more – and stood in front of the mirror. I had to go into Carl Van Loon’s office, but all of a sudden I felt extremely uncomfortable about having to go anywhere dressed like this. I thought I looked strange. A while later, as I made my way into the lobby of the Van Loon Building on Forty-eighth Street, I was so self-conscious that I half expected someone to tap me on the shoulder and tell me it had all been a terrible mistake, and that Mr Van Loon had left instructions to have me escorted from the building if I happened to show up.

Then, in the elevator to the sixty-second floor, I started thinking about the deal I was supposed to be brokering with Van Loon – the Abraxas buyout of MCL-Parnassus. I hadn’t given any thought to it for days – but now, as soon as I tried to recall any of the specifics, the whole subject became a blur. I kept hearing the phrase ‘option value pricing-model’ in my head, hearing it over and over – option value pricing-model, option value pricing-model – but I had only the vaguest notion any more of what this meant. I also knew that ‘the build-out of a broadband infrastructure’ was important, but I couldn’t quite figure out why. It was like waking up after a dream in which you’ve been speaking a foreign language only to find out that you don’t speak the language at all, and barely even understand a word of it.

I stepped out of the elevator and into the lobby area. I walked over to the main desk and stood for a moment, waiting to catch the receptionist’s attention. It was the same woman who’d been here the previous Thursday, so when she turned to me, I smiled. But she didn’t show any sign of recognition.

‘May I help you, sir?’

Her tone was formal and quite chilly.

‘Eddie Spinola,’ I said, ‘for Mr Van Loon.’

She consulted her diary and then started to shake her head. She seemed to be about to tell me something – maybe that Mr Van Loon was out of the country, or that she had no record of my appointment – but just then, walking slowly from a corridor to the left of the reception desk, Van Loon himself appeared. He looked sombre and as he put a hand out to greet me I noticed that his stoop was more pronounced than I’d remembered.

The receptionist went back to what she’d been doing before I interrupted her.

‘Eddie, how are you?’

‘I’m fine, Carl. Feeling much better.’

We shook hands.

‘Good. Good. Come on in.’

I was struck again by the size of Van Loon’s office, which was long and wide, but decorated very sparely. He went over to his desk and sat behind it. He indicated that I should sit as well.

He sighed, and shook his head for a moment. ‘OK, look Eddie,’ he said, ‘that thing in the Post Friday was not good, not the kind of publicity we want associated with this deal, yeah?’

I nodded, unsure about where this might lead. I’d half hoped that the article might escape his notice.

‘Hank doesn’t know you, and the deal is still under wraps, so there’s nothing to worry about, yet. I just don’t think you should show your face down at Lafayette any more.’

‘No, of course not.’

‘Keep a low profile. Trade here. Like I said, we have our own trading room. It’s discreet and private.’ He smiled. ‘No fucking baseball caps.’

I smiled at this, too – but I actually felt quite uncomfortable, and nervous, as if I could very easily throw up.

‘I’ll have someone show you around the floor later.’

‘Yeah.’

‘The other thing I wanted to tell you, and maybe this is a good thing, is that Hank won’t be here tomorrow. He’s been delayed in LA, so we’re not going to have that meeting until… probably until the middle or even the end of… next week.’

‘Yeah, OK,’ I mumbled, finding it hard to look Van Loon in the eye, ‘it’s probably… like you say, it’s probably a good thing, no?’

‘Yeah.’ He picked a pen up from his desk and fiddled with it. ‘I’m going to be away, too – until the weekend at least, so it gives us a little breathing space. We were rushed on Thursday in my opinion, but we can go at our own pace now, hone the figures, put a really air-tight package together.’

I looked up and saw that Van Loon was handing me something. I reached across the desk to take it. What he was handing me was the yellow legal pad that I’d used the previous Thursday to write out the option values on.

‘I want you to expand these projections and do them up on the computer.’ He cleared his throat. ‘By the way, I’ve been looking at them and I’ve got a couple of questions I want to ask you.’

I sat back now and stared at the dense rows of figures and mathematical symbols on the first page of the legal pad. Even though it was all in my own handwriting, I had difficulty making any sense of it and felt that I was looking at some strange form of hieroglyphics. Gradually, however, what was on the page reconfigured itself before my eyes into something vaguely familiar, and I saw that if I could only concentrate on it for an hour or two I’d probably be able to decode it.

But with Carl Van Loon sitting directly opposite me now, and ready to ask questions, a couple of hours wasn’t really an option. This was the first serious indication I’d had that my strategy of minimum dosage was only going to be good for one thing: keeping the headaches at bay. Because none of the other stuff was happening, and I was becoming increasingly aware of what it meant to feel ‘normal’. It meant not being able to influence people and make them anxious to do things for you. It meant not being able to run with your instincts and invariably be right. It meant not being able to recall minute details and make rapid calculations.

‘I can see a couple of inconsistencies here,’ I said, in an attempt to head off Van Loon’s questions. ‘And you’re right, we were rushed.’

I flicked over to the second page and then got up from my chair. Pretending to be focused on the projections, I walked around for a bit and tried to think of what I was going to say next – like an actor who’s forgotten his lines.

‘I wanted to ask you,’ Van Loon said from his desk, ‘why is the life of the… third option there different from the others?’

I looked around at him for a second, mumbled something and then went back to the legal pad. I stared at it intently, but my mind was blank and I knew that nothing was going to suddenly pop into it that would rescue me.

‘The third one?’ I said, stalling for time, flipping the pages over.

Then I just flipped all the pages back again and put the pad under my arm. ‘You know what, Carl?’ I said, looking at him directly now, ‘I’m going to have to go over these carefully. Let me do them up on the computer at home like you said and then maybe we can-’

‘The third option, Eddie,’ he said, raising his voice suddenly, ‘what’s the big fucking deal? You’re not going to let me ask you a simple question?’

I was standing about five yards now from the desk of a man who had appeared on dozens of magazine covers – a billionaire, an entrepreneur, an icon – and he was shouting at me. I didn’t know how to respond. I was out of my depth. I was afraid.

And then, luckily, his telephone rang. He picked it up and barked, ‘What?’

I waited a second before turning around and moving away to let him speak. My hands were shaking slightly and the nauseous feeling I’d had earlier came back.

‘Don’t send those ones,’ Van Loon was saying into the phone behind me. ‘Check with Mancuso before you do anything – and listen, about the delivery dates…’

Relieved to be off the hook for a while, I drifted further down this huge room, towards the windows. These were full-length, with a west-facing view that was partially obscured by hanging blinds. I would tell Van Loon when he got off the phone that I had a migraine or something and that I couldn’t focus properly. He’d seen me write the stuff out on Thursday and we’d talked about it in detail, so he could hardly doubt my command of the material. The important thing now, for me, was just to get out of there.

As I waited, I glanced around at the office. The top part was dominated by Van Loon’s enormous desk, but the rest of it had the airy and austere feel to it of a waiting-room in an Art Deco railway station. By the time I got to the windows, I had the impression that Van Loon was far behind me, and that if I were to turn around he’d be a figure in the distance – his voice barely audible, droning on about delivery dates. At this end of the room there were some red leather couches and low glass tables with business magazines scattered on them.

As I stood at the windows, peering through the hanging blinds, one of the first things I noticed – in among the familiar cluster of midtown skyscrapers – was a glimmering shard of the Celestial Building over on the West Side. From this perspective, it seemed to be huddled in among a dozen other buildings, but if you looked closely you could see that it was further back than the others, and that it actually stood alone. It seemed incredible to me that I’d been in the Celestial a couple of days before, and had even contemplated buying an apartment in it – and one of the costlier units at that…

Nine and a half million dollars.

‘Eddie!’

I turned around.

Van Loon was off the phone and approaching from the other end of the room.

I braced myself.

‘Something’s come up, Eddie. I have to go. I’m sorry.’ His tone was all friendly now, and when he arrived at where I was standing, he nodded at the yellow legal pad under my arm. ‘Do up that stuff and we’ll talk. As I said I’m away until the weekend, so that should give you enough time.’ He clapped his hands together suddenly. ‘OK, you want to have a look at our trading floor? I’ll call Sam Welles and have him show you around.’

‘I think I’ll head home and just get stuck into this, if you don’t mind,’ I said, and nudged my arm forward.

‘But it’d only take-’ Van Loon paused and stared at me for a moment. I could see that he was puzzled, and probably felt a mild antagonism towards me, just as he had earlier, but he clearly didn’t understand why this was happening to him and wasn’t sure how to handle it.

Then he said, ‘What’s the matter with you, Eddie? You’re not going soft on me, are you?’

‘No, I-’

‘Because this shit isn’t for the faint-hearted.’

‘I know that, I just-’

‘And I’m out on a limb here, Eddie. No one knows about this. You fuck up on me, you talk about this – my credibility is blown.’

‘I know, I know.’ I indicated again to the pad under my arm, ‘… I just want to get this right.’

Van Loon held my gaze for a moment and then sighed, as if to say, ‘Well that’s nice to know.’ Then he turned around and started walking back towards his desk. I followed him.

‘Call me when you’re done,’ he said. He had his back to me now, and was standing at the front of the desk, consulting something, a diary or a notebook. ‘And make it no later than Tuesday or Wednesday of next week.’

I hesitated, but then realized I’d just been dismissed. I walked out of the office without saying another word.

On my way home, I stopped off at a Gristede’s and bought a few large packs of potato chips and some beers. Back in the apartment, I sat at my desk, got out the thick folder of stuff Van Loon had sent me the previous week and assembled my notes. I thought if I could come to grips with all of this material, I’d be OK. I’d be as informed and up-to-date as I had been when I’d impressed Van Loon with my proposal for structuring the buy-out deal.

I kicked off with the set of MCL-Parnassus quarterly reports in the folder. I laid them out on my desk, opened the first pack of chips and bottle of beer, and started reading.

It took me about two hours of assiduous page-turning before I could admit to myself that not only was this material stultifyingly boring, it was also largely incomprehensible to me. The problem was simple: I couldn’t remember how to interpret this kind of stuff. I had a look at some of the other documents, and although these were slightly less dense and impenetrable than the quarterly reports, they were no less boring. But I persevered, and made sure that I read everything – or, at least in the sense that my eye passed over every word and every line, didn’t miss anything.

I finished all of the chips and beer and ordered up Chinese at about ten o’clock. Shortly after midnight, I finally caved in and went to bed.

The next morning I made a quick and terrifying calculation. It had taken me eight hours the day before to read what previously I’d read in about forty-five minutes. I then tried to recall some of it, but could only summon up fragments, generalities. Previously I’d been able to remember all of it, back to front, inside out.

The temptation at this stage to take a couple of MDT pills was very strong indeed, but I persevered. If I went back full-thrust on MDT, I would only end up having more blackouts, and where would that leave me? So the pattern remained the same over the next couple of days. I stayed at home and waded through hundreds of pages of material, only leaving the apartment to get stuff like potato chips and cheeseburgers and beer. I watched a good deal of TV, but studiously avoided newscasts and current affairs shows. I kept my phone unplugged. I suppose at some level I created the illusion for myself that I was coming to grips with the material, but as the days passed I had to admit that very little of it was sinking in.

On the Wednesday evening I detected the onset of another headache. I wasn’t sure what had caused it, maybe it was all the beer and junk food I’d been consuming, but when it hadn’t gone away by Thursday morning I decided to up the minimum dosage of MDT to one pill a day. Of course, within about twenty minutes of taking this higher dosage my headache had lifted, and – of course – I started worrying. How long would it be before I had to increase the dosage again? How long would it be before I was chugging down three or even four pills each morning just to keep the headaches at bay?

I took out Vernon’s little notebook again and examined it. I had no desire to go through the same routine as before, but I nevertheless felt that if there was any hope left in this situation it had to lie somewhere in among these numbers. I decided to call a few of the ones that had been crossed out and didn’t have replacements written in above or below them. Maybe I would discover that they belonged to people who were still alive, and weren’t even sick, people who would talk to me, ex-clients. Or maybe – more likely – I would find out that the reason they were ex-clients was because they were dead. But it was worth a try.

I called five numbers. The first three were no longer in service. The fourth number didn’t reply or have an answering machine. The fifth one picked up after two rings.

‘Yep?’

‘Hello. May I speak to Donald Geisler please?’

‘Speaking. What do you want?’

‘I was a friend of Vernon Gant’s. I don’t know if you know but he was killed a while back and I was-’

I stopped.

He’d hung up.

It was a response, though. And clearly the guy wasn’t dead. I waited ten minutes and called again.

‘Yep?’

‘Please don’t hang up. Please.’

There was a pause, during which Donald Geisler didn’t hang up. Or say anything.

‘I’m looking for some help,’ I said, ‘some information maybe. I don’t know.’

‘Where did you get this number?’

‘It was… among Vernon’s things.’

‘Shit!’

‘But there’s noth-’

‘Are you a cop? Is this an investigation of some kind?’

‘No. Vernon was an old friend of mine.’

‘I don’t like this.’

‘In fact, he was my ex-brother-in-law.’

‘That doesn’t make me feel any better.’

‘Look, this is about-’

‘Don’t say it on the phone.’

I stopped again. He knew.

‘OK, I won’t. But is there any way that I could talk to you? I need your help. I mean, you obviously know-’

‘You need my help? I don’t think so.’

‘Yes, because-’

‘Look, I’m going to hang up now. So don’t phone me back. In fact, don’t ever try to contact me again, and-’

‘Mr Geisler, I might be dying.’

‘Oh, Christ.’

‘And I need-’

‘Leave me alone, all right?’

He hung up.

My heart was thumping.

If Donald Geisler didn’t want to talk to me, there wasn’t much I could do about it. He mightn’t have been able to help in any case, but it was still frustrating to make such brief contact with someone who obviously knew what MDT was.

Not in the mood any more to go on with this, I put the black notebook away. Then, in an effort to distract myself, I returned to my desk and picked up a document that I’d printed out earlier from a financial website.

I opened it and started reading.

The document was a highly technical article about anti-trust legislation and by page three my attention had already drifted. After a while I stopped reading, put the article down and lit up a cigarette. Then I just sat there for ages, smoking, staring into space.

Later, in the afternoon, I made a trip to the bank. Gennady was coming the next morning for the second payment on the loan and I wanted to be ready for him. I withdrew over $100,000 in cash, my intention being to pay off the whole loan straightaway – the repayments, the vig, everything. That way I could get him off my back. If Gennady had taken the five MDT pills – and that was the only plausible explanation for the fact that they were missing – I certainly didn’t want him coming around to my apartment every Friday morning.

As I was waiting for them to get the cash ready, my balding and overweight bank manager, Howard Lewis, invited me into his office for a little chat. This walking heart-attack seemed to be concerned that after my initial flurry of activity with Klondike and Lafayette – resulting, admittedly, in some fairly substantial deposits – things had been, ‘… well, quiet.’

I looked across the desk at him in disbelief.

‘… and then there are these rather large cash withdrawals, Mr Spinola.’

‘What about them?’ I said, my tone adding, as if it’s any of your fucking business.

‘Nothing in themselves, Mr Spinola, of course, but… well, in the light of that piece in last Friday’s Post about-’

‘What about-?’

‘Look, it’s all very… irregular. I mean, these days you can’t be too-’

‘In the light of my time at Lafayette, Mr Lewis,’ I said, barely able to contain my irritation, ‘I am currently in negotiations for a position as a senior trader at Van Loon & Associates.’

He looked back at me, breathing out slowly through his nose, as if what I’d said confirmed his worst fears about me.

His phone rang, and he scooped it up, a muscle on his face quivering slightly by way of apology. As he dealt with the call, I glanced around. Until that point, I’d been feeling quite indignant, but this cooled somewhat when I saw my reflection in the back panel of a silver photo-frame on Lewis’s desk. It was a partially distorted image, but nothing could conceal how scruffy I looked. I hadn’t shaved that morning and I was wearing old jeans and a T-shirt – implausible for a senior trader at Van Loon & Associates, even on a day off.

Howard Lewis finished his call, pressed another button on his phone, listened for a moment and then looked at me with a blank expression on his face.

‘Your withdrawal is ready, Mr Spinola.’

Gennady arrived at nine-thirty the following morning. I’d just woken up about twenty minutes before he arrived and I was still feeling groggy. I’d intended to be up earlier, but from about seven on I’d kept waking and then falling back to sleep again, slipping in and out of dreams. When I finally managed to get out of bed, the first thing I did was take my MDT pill. Then I removed the bowl from the shelf above the computer. After that, I put on a pot of coffee and just stood around in boxer shorts and a T-shirt, waiting.

There were two possibilities. Either Gennady had done the pills – and if he’d done one he’d have done them all. Or, for some reason, he hadn’t done the pills. I reckoned that when I saw him I would know fairly quickly which one it was.

‘Morning,’ I said, studying him closely as he made his way in from the hallway.

He nodded, but didn’t say anything. Then I watched him as he silently surveyed my apartment. At first, I thought he was looking for the missing ceramic bowl, but then I realized that he was just registering how different the place was from the last time he’d been here. Looking around with him, following his eye, I registered the changes for myself. The apartment was a mess. Papers and documents and folders were strewn about the place. There was an empty pizza box on the couch and there were a couple of Chinese takeout cartons on my desk beside the computer. There were beer cans and coffee mugs everywhere, and full ashtrays and CDs and empty CD covers and shirts and socks.

‘You some kind of fucking pig?’

I shrugged my shoulders. ‘You can’t get decent help these days.’

He furrowed his brow at this, slightly puzzled, and I knew straightaway that he wasn’t on MDT – not right now at any rate.

‘Where the money?’

After he said this I noticed him glancing over at the shelf above the computer. When he didn’t see what he was looking for, he stepped a little closer to the desk and continued his discreet search.

‘I want to pay off the whole thing now,’ I said.

This caught his attention, and he turned to look at me. I’d left a bag with all the cash in it on top of one of the bookshelves. I reached up now and got it down.

Gennady shook his head when he saw the bag.

‘What?’ I said.

‘Twenty-two five.’

‘But I want to pay it all off.’

‘You can’t.’

‘But-’

‘Twenty-two five.’

I was going to say something else, but there was no point. I sighed and took the bag over to the table, made a space and started counting out the twenty-two five. When I’d finished, I handed the wad of cash to Gennady and he put it into his inside jacket pocket.

‘Did you get a chance to read that treatment?’ I said.

He sighed and shook his head.

‘No time. Too busy.’

He glanced over once more at the desk.

‘Maybe next time,’ he said, and then left.

I made an effort to clean the place up after Gennady had gone, but quickly lost interest. Then I sat on the couch and tried to read an article in the latest issue of Fortune magazine, a survey of ‘hot’ developments in e-commerce, but when I’d made it a paragraph or two in, I started dozing and let the magazine drop from my hand and fall to the floor. In the late afternoon, I had a shower and shaved. I got dressed, took a handful of cash from the bag I’d left on the table in the dining area and headed out – not having been out, except to get food, for nearly a week. I wandered over to the West Village and stopped off at a couple of bars I occasionally went to and started drinking vodka Martinis.

Towards the end of the evening I found myself, fairly trashed, in a quiet place on Second Avenue and Tenth. I was sitting at the bar, and a bit further down there was a television set above where the cash register was, on wall-brackets. A movie had been playing – something, judging by the hair and clothes, from 1983 or 1984. The volume had been turned right down, but now a news bulletin came on and the barman turned it up.

The sudden intrusion of sound from the TV killed off any conversation in the bar, and everyone – dutifully, drunkenly – gazed up at the screen to listen to the headlines.

‘Middle East peace-talks at Camp David break down after two weeks of intensive negotiations. Hurricane Julius arrives off the south coast of Florida, leaving a trail of devastation in its wake. And Donatella Alvarez, who has been in a coma for two weeks after a brutal attack in a Manhattan hotel room, dies this afternoon – police say they are now conducting a full-scale murder investigation.’

I stared in shock at the screen as the newscaster went back to the details of the peace-talks story. I grabbed on to the side of the bar, and held it tightly. After a couple of seconds, I mumbled something – maybe audibly, maybe not – and swung around to get off my stool.

I stood there for a moment, swaying from side to side, very unsteadily. The room then began to spin, and I moved, staggering the few yards over to the door. I just about made it out into the street before splatting an evening’s worth of vodka, vermouth and olives up on to the sidewalk.

20

I CONTINUED DRINKING OVER the weekend, mostly vodka, and mostly at home. After all, what else was there to do? I’d just become the subject of a full-scale murder investigation – albeit, and very con veniently, under an assumed name – so surely, in the circumstances, a little drinkie or two could hardly be seen as anything other than appropriate. I wasn’t making any further pretense at reading ‘the material’ either, so I gave in for a while and went back to watching the news on TV. This quickly became all I wanted to watch and again I found myself wading through hours of mindless crap, shouting drunken abuse at the screen as I waited for the next bulletin to come on.

There wasn’t much for the media to say about Donatella Alvarez herself – the woman had died and that’s all there was to it. What most of the reports were focusing on now was the political fall-out from her death. This came in the form of renewed calls for the Defense Secretary to resign. The brouhaha over Caleb Hale’s original comments about Mexico had received a shot in the arm when the Alvarez story first broke, and another one now with her death. I hadn’t followed the story too closely, but I’d been aware of it in the background – aware of it as one of those bizarre developments that takes on a life of its own and enters the news-chain like some kind of virus.

Six weeks or so earlier, Caleb Hale was reported to have said at a private gathering that Mexico had become a liability for the US and that ‘we should just consider invading the damned place’. The source that leaked the story to the Los Angeles Times claimed that Hale had name-checked corruption, insurgency, the breakdown of law and order, the debt crisis and drug-trafficking as the five points on ‘the pentangle of Mexico’s instability’. The source went on to claim that Hale had even cited John O’Sullivan on our ‘manifest destiny to overspread the continent’ and had mentioned an op-ed piece he’d once read called ‘Mexico: The Iran Next Door’. Caleb Hale immediately issued a classic non-denial denial, but then proceeded, in an interview, to more or less justify precisely what he was claiming not to have said. The President was perceived to be weighing in behind Hale when he not only refused to demand the Secretary’s resignation but also refused to condemn his alleged remarks – which of course opened the floodgates of comment and speculation. Everyone was initially shocked and incredulous, but as the days passed certain influential quarters appeared to warm to the idea, and early conclusions about the Defense Secretary being seriously out of touch softened a little, with some even transforming into a broad endorsement for, at the very least, a tougher line on foreign policy.

Now, with what was perceived as a racially motivated killing tossed into the mix, the debate had gone into overdrive. There were interviews, panel discussions, sound bites, one-liners, earnest reports from dusty border towns, aerial shots of the Rio Grande. I watched from my couch, glass in hand, and got caught up in it all as though I were watching a prime-time soap – continually forgetting in my alcoholic euphoria that I was perhaps just a fingerprint or DNA test away from full involvement in this myself, that I was perilously close to eye of the storm.

As the weekend progressed, however, and euphoria degenerated into numbness, and then anxiety, and then dread – my viewing patterns shifted. I cut down drastically on news shows, and towards Sunday evening found myself skipping them altogether. Increasingly, it was easier to switch over to channels where there were re-runs of Hawaii Five-O to be found – and Happy Days and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.

On the Monday I tried to stay sober, but didn’t do too well. I had a few beers during the afternoon, and then opened a bottle of vodka in the evening. I spent most of the time listening to music, and eventually crashed out on the couch that night in my clothes. It had been getting steadily warmer over the previous week and I’d been leaving the window open most nights, but when I jolted awake from a confused dream at about 4 a.m., I noticed immediately that the temperature had dropped. It was a good deal chillier than when I’d fallen asleep, so I got off the couch, shivering, and went over to the window to close it. I sat back on the couch, but as I stared into the blue darkness of the night, the shivering continued. I realized, as well, that my heart was palpitating, and that the unpleasant tingling sensation I had in my limbs wasn’t normal. I tried to identify what was happening to me. One possibility was that my system needed more alcohol, in which case I quickly scrolled down through the options – I could get dressed and go out to a bar, or I could go to a Korean deli down the street and buy a couple of six-packs, or I could just drink the cooking sherry I had in the kitchen. But I didn’t really think booze was the problem, because the very idea now of going outside, to the street, to a neon-lit deli with other people in it, struck terror into me.

So that was it, I thought – I was having a fucking panic attack.

I kept taking deep breaths, and hitting one of the sofa cushions beside me with the back of my hand. It was four o’clock in the morning. I couldn’t call anyone. I couldn’t go anywhere. I couldn’t sleep. I felt like a cornered rat.

I sat it out, though – on the couch. It was like having a massive heart attack that went on for an hour but didn’t kill you, or even leave you with any physical after effects, nothing that a doctor might find if he were to subject you to a whole battery of tests.

The next day, I decided I had to do something. I’d slipped too far and too fast, and knew that if I slipped any further I’d be in danger of losing everything – although quite what ‘everything’ now meant was clearly open to interpretation. In any case, I had to do something – but the problem was, what? The most immediate and pressing concern was the Donatella Alvarez situation, but that was out of my control. Then, of course, there was Carl Van Loon. But frankly, my whole association with him was beginning to seem a little remote to me. I found it hard to accept that I had actually ‘worked’ with him, especially on something so improbable as the ‘financials’ of a corporate takeover deal. In memory, our various sessions together – in the Orpheus Room, in his apartment, in his office, in the Four Seasons – felt more like dreams now than recollections of real events, and seemed, as well, to have the twisted logic of dreams.

But at the same time I couldn’t just ignore the situation. Not any longer. I couldn’t ignore the reality that leapt up at me every time I looked at my own handwriting on Van Loon’s yellow legal pad. Remote as it all might seem now, I had been involved with him, and I had helped to shape the MCL-Abraxas deal. So if I wanted to salvage anything from the experience, I would have to confront Van Loon, and as soon as possible.

I took a shower and shaved. I still felt fairly lousy as I went into the bedroom to get my suit out of the closet, but it was nothing to what I felt when I tried to put it on. I hadn’t worn it in over a week and now all of a sudden I was struggling at the waist to get the trousers closed. It was my only presentable suit, though – so I had no choice but to wear it.

I took a cab to Forty-eighth Street.

As I walked across the main lobby of the Van Loon Building and rode the elevator up to the sixty-second floor, a sense of dread grew within me. Stepping out into the now familiar reception area of Van Loon & Associates, I identified this feeling, correctly, as the onset of another panic attack.

I hung around for a few moments in the middle of the reception area and pretended to be consulting something on the back of a large brown envelope I was carrying – a name, or an address. The envelope contained Van Loon’s yellow legal pad, but there was nothing written on it. I glanced over at the receptionist, who glanced back at me and then picked up one of her telephones. My heart was beating rapidly now and the pain in my chest had become almost unbearable. I turned around and headed in the direction of the elevators. What had I been proposing to do in any case – confront Van Loon? But how? By returning the projections exactly as we’d left them? By showing him I was on a crash diet of cheeseburgers and pizza?

It had been reckless of me to come in here like this. I obviously hadn’t been thinking straight.

The doors finally opened, but the relief of getting away from the reception area was short-lived, because I now had to contend with the elevator car, the interior of which, with its reflective steel panels, its controlled climate and relentless humming, felt as if it had been custom-built to induce and fuel panic attacks. It was a physical environment that seemed to ape the very symptoms of anxiety – the sinking feeling, the uncontrollable fluttering in the stomach, the everpresent threat of nausea.

I closed my eyes, but then couldn’t help picturing the dark elevator shafts above and below me… couldn’t help imagining the heavy steel cables snapping as the car and its counterweights accelerated rapidly in opposite directions, the car naturally hurtling downwards, free-falling to ground level…

Instead it came to a barely perceptible halt near the foot of this concrete tube, and the door slid gently open. To my surprise, standing there – waiting to step inside – was Ginny Van Loon.

‘Mr Spinola!’

When I didn’t respond immediately, she stepped forward and stretched a hand out to take me by the arm, ‘Are you all right?’

I got out of the elevator car and moved with her into the lobby area, which was crowded and busy, and almost as terrifying – though for different reasons – as the elevator car. I was in a cold sweat now and had started shivering again. She said, ‘My God, Mr Spinola, you look-’

‘Like shit?’

‘Well,’ she replied after a moment, ‘yeah.’

We made our way across the lobby and stopped by a large copper-tinted window that looked out on to Forty-eighth Street.

‘What… what’s the matter? What happened?’

I focused on her properly now and saw that her concern was genuine. She was still holding on to my arm and for some reason this made me feel slightly better. Once I acknowledged that, there was a knock-on effect and I managed to calm down considerably.

‘I was… up on sixty-two,’ I said, ‘but I didn’t-’

‘You couldn’t take the heat, right? I knew you weren’t one of Daddy’s business guys. Anyway, they’re nothing but a bunch of automatons.’

‘Automata. I think I was having a panic attack.’

‘Good for you. Anyone who doesn’t have a panic attack up there has something seriously wrong with them. And you can say automatons if you want.’ She paused. ‘You can say referendums.’

‘Yeah,’ I said, trying to catch my breath, ‘referendums, sure, but you wouldn’t say phenomenons, would you?’

She was wearing black jeans and a black sweater and was carrying a small leather doctor’s bag.

‘Not if I was talking to you, obviously. Anyway, one’s from Latin and the other’s from Greek, the rules are different, so fuck you. How are you feeling now?’

I took a few deep breaths and held my chest.

‘A little better, thanks.’

Aware, suddenly, of my newly acquired girth, I tried to stand up a little straighter and to breathe in.

Ginny studied me for a while.

‘Mr Spi-’

‘Eddie, call me Eddie. Jesus, I’m only thir-’

‘Eddie, are you sick?’

‘Hhn?’

‘I mean, are you unwell? Because you really look unwell. You’ve…’ – she struggled to find the right words – ‘… you’ve… since that time I saw you in the apartment, you’ve put on some, well… some weight. And-’

‘My weight fluctuates.’

‘Yeah, but that was, what, only two weeks ago?’

I held up my hands. ‘Hey, can’t a fellah have a couple of creamcakes once in a while?’

She smiled, but then said, ‘Look, I’m sorry, I know it’s none of my business, but I just think you should look after yourself better.’

‘Yeah, yeah. I know. You’re right.’

My breathing was more regular now and I felt a good deal better. I asked her what she was doing.

‘I’m going up to see Daddy.’

‘You want to get some coffee instead?’

‘I can’t.’ She made a face. ‘Anyway, if you’ve just had a panic attack, I think you should probably be avoiding coffee. Drink juice, or something wholesome that won’t exacerbate your stress levels.’

I straightened up again and leant back against the window.

‘Come and have a wholesome juice with me then.’

She looked directly into my eyes. Hers were bright blue – sparkling, cerulean, celestial.

‘I can’t.’

I was going to push it, ask her why not, but then I didn’t. I got a flickering sense that she was a little uncomfortable all of a sudden, which in turn made me uncomfortable. It also struck me that feelings of panic probably came in waves, and that while an attack might abate, it might just as easily come back. I didn’t want to be around here if that happened, even with Ginny.

‘OK, look,’ I said, ‘thank you very much. I’m really glad I bumped into you.’

She smiled. ‘Are you going to be OK?’

I nodded.

‘You sure?’

‘Yeah, I’m fine. Absolutely. Thanks.’

She patted me on the shoulder and said, ‘OK, so long, Eddie.’

A second later she was walking away from me across the lobby, her little doctor’s bag swinging by her side. Then – enveloped suddenly into the crowd – she was gone.

I turned to face the huge window behind where I was standing and saw myself reflected in its bronze-tinted glass, people and cars outside on Forty-eighth Street passing right through me as though I were a ghost. In addition to everything else, I now found myself in the inappropriate position of being disappointed that Van Loon’s daughter apparently refused to see me as anything other than a genial associate of her father’s – and a pedantic, panic-stricken, overweight one at that. I left the building, made my way over to Fifth Avenue and started walking downtown. Despite these grim thoughts, I somehow managed to keep things under control. Then, as I was crossing Forty-second Street, something else occurred to me, and I shoved my hand out, on impulse, to hail a cab.

Twenty minutes later I was taking another elevator, this time up to the fourth floor of Lafayette Trading on Broad Street. This had been the scene of earlier triumphs – days of excitement and success – and I figured now there was no longer anything to stop me from trying to re-create that. I didn’t have the advantage of being full-thrust on MDT, OK, but neither did I care any more. My confidence had taken a bruising, and I just wanted to see how well I could do on my own.

There was a mixed reaction when I walked into the room. Some people, including Jay Zollo, went out of their way to ignore me. Others couldn’t help smiling and doffing their baseball caps in my direction. Even though I hadn’t been there for a while and didn’t have any positions open, my account was still active. I was told my ‘usual’ spot was taken, but that others were available and I could start trading immediately if I wanted to.

As I took my place at one of the terminals and got ready, I could feel a curiosity growing in the room about what I intended to do. There was a definite buzz now, with some people looking over my shoulder, and others keeping a close eye on things from the opposite side of the ‘pit’. It was a lot of pressure to be under and when I found that I wasn’t quite sure how to proceed, I had to admit to myself that perhaps I’d been a little hasty in coming here. But it was too late to pull out.

I spent a while studying the screen, and gradually it all came back to me. It wasn’t such a complicated process – but what was complicated, of course, was choosing the right stocks. I hadn’t been following the markets of late and didn’t really know where to look. My previous strategy of short-selling, which had been heavily dependent on research, wasn’t much use to me either, so I decided to play it safe on my first day back – I decided to go with the prevailing wisdom and buy tech stocks. I bought shares in Lir Systems, a risk-management services company, in KeyGate Technologies, an Internet security outfit, and in various dot-coms, Boojum, Wotlarks!, @Ease, Dromio, PorkBarrel.com, eTranz, WorkNet.

Once I started I couldn’t stop, and thanks to a combination of recklessness and fear, I ended up emptying my bank account, spending everything I had in the space of a couple of hours. Matters weren’t helped by the artificial, game-like nature of electronic trading, nor by the dangerous sense I increasingly had that the money involved wasn’t real. Naturally, this storm of activity attracted a lot of attention in the room, and even though my ‘strategy’ was about as unoriginal and mainstream as you could get, the rate and scale of my trading obviously gave it a curious shape – a colour, a character – of its own. Before long, as a result, people started following my lead, watching my every move, channelling ‘tips’ and ‘information’ out from my workstation. There was an urgency about the whole thing – no one wanted to get left behind – and I soon had the impression that lots of the traders around me were borrowing heavily or renegotiating leverage on their deposits.

The dizzying Net stocks boom still had the power, apparently, to disorient and whipsaw anyone who dared to get near it – and this included me, because although I’d landed here today on the back of my reputation, of my previous performance, I was now beginning to realize that this time around not only did I not know what I was doing, I didn’t know how to stop…

Eventually, however, the pressure became too much for me. It kick-started another panic attack, and left me no choice but to just grab the envelope and go – without even closing out my positions. This caused some degree of consternation in the room, but I think most of the Lafayette traders had come to expect the unexpected from me and I managed to get away without too much hassle. A good number of the stocks I’d bought had already gone up by tiny margins, so no one was worried or nervous – they were just unhappy at letting what they saw as an übertrader escape from their midst. On my way down in the elevator, my heart started palpitating again and when I got out on to the street I felt really horrible. I walked down Broad Street to the South Ferry Terminal and then over to Battery Park, where I sat on a bench, undid my tie and gazed out at Staten Island.

I remained there for about half an hour, taking deep breaths and fielding dark, unsettling thoughts. I wanted to be at home, on my couch, but I didn’t want to go through what was required to get there, which was negotiate the streets again, and the people, and the traffic. But after another while I just stood up and started walking. I went over to State Street and managed to get a taxi at once. I slumped into the back seat, clutching the envelope, and as the cab inched its way forward through the traffic, up past Bowling Green on to Broadway, and then past Beaver Street and Exchange Place and Wall Street itself, I had a fleeting impression that something quite odd was happening. It was difficult to put my finger on what it was exactly, but there was a very jittery atmosphere in the streets. People were stopping and talking, some whispering conspiratorially, others shouting across cars, or from the steps of buildings, or into cellphones – and in that curious way people have when some dire public event has taken place, like an assassination or an upset in the World Series. Then there was a break in the traffic and we surged forward out of the financial district, leaving behind whatever it was I’d picked up on. Soon we were crossing Canal Street and then a few moments later turning right on to Houston, where it was business as usual.

When I got home, I made straight for the couch and flopped down on to it. The taxi ride had been unbearable and once or twice I’d come close to having the driver stop and let me out. Lying on the couch wasn’t that much better, but at least I was in a familiar, controlled environment. For the next hour or so, I vacillated between thinking that the attack would pass, and thinking that… no, I was going to die – here, today, right now, on this fucking couch…

But when, eventually, I didn’t die, and had started to feel a bit less awful, I reached down from the side of the couch to pick up the remote control panel, which was lying on the floor. I zapped the main TV into action and surfed through the channels. It took me a few moments to focus, and to realize that something was going on. I went to CNNfn, then to CNBC, and then back again to CNNfn. I looked at the corner of the screen to check the time.

It was 2.35 p.m. and since about 1 p.m. – apparently – the markets had been in freefall. The Nasdaq had already dropped 319 points, the Dow Jones 185 points, and the S & P 93 points, with none of them showing any signs of halting, let alone bouncing back. Both CNNfn and CNBC were providing minute-by-minute coverage from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, as well as from their respective studios – the main thrust of the story being that the tech-stocks bubble appeared to be bursting in slo-mo before our very eyes…

I went over to my desk and switched on the computer. I was curiously calm, but when I saw the quotes, and saw how far the share prices had plunged, I began to feel dizzy. I put my head in my hands and tried not to panic – and just about succeeded… probably by sparing a thought for all those traders down in Lafayette who as a consequence of following my leads would almost certainly have been wiped out as well. Though I was ready to bet that none of them had lost as much as I had, which was now more than likely somewhere in the region of a million dollars…

21

THE NEXT MORNING I WENT OUT to get the papers – as well as to do a provisions run to Gristede’s and the liquor store. The headlines ranged from things like OUCH! and NIGHTMARE ON QUEASY STREET to INVESTOR CAUTION AFTER MARKETS TUMBLE. The Nasdaq had rallied somewhat in the late p.m. – after a staggering lowest-point drop of 9 per cent – and was continuing to recover this morning. This was thanks to a few brokerage houses and mutual funds who’d seen the bottom coming and started buying on the dip. Some commentators were hysterical, talking about a repeat of Black Monday – or even of 1929 – but others took a more sanguine approach, saying that recent speculative excess in technology stocks had now been purged… or that what we had witnessed wasn’t so much a wide-spread correction as a cleansing action in the frothier parts of the Nasdaq. This was all very reassuring for the long-haul players, but not much consolation to the millions of small-time investors who’d bought on margin and then been annihilated by the big sell-off.

Poring over opinion pieces in the newspapers, however, wasn’t going to change anything. It wasn’t going to change the fact – for example – that my bank account had been cleaned out, or that I wouldn’t be able to trade any more at Lafayette.

Putting the newspapers aside, I looked at the bag of cash on the cluttered dining table and reminded myself, for the fiftieth time, that what was in that bag was the sum total of what I had left in the world – and that I owed it all to a Russian loanshark…

Gennady’s visit on Friday morning was going to be the next event of any significance in my life, but I certainly wasn’t looking forward to it. I spent the couple of days in between drinking and listening to music. At one point during this time – and more than half-way through a late-night bottle of Absolut – I got to thinking about Ginny Van Loon, and what a curious girl she was. I went online and searched through various newspaper and magazine archives for any references there might be to her. I found quite a lot of stuff, quotes from ‘Page Six’ and the ‘Styles’ section of the New York Times, clippings, profiles and even some photos – a sixteen-year-old Ginny out of her head at the River Club with Tony De Torrio, Ginny surrounded by models and fashion designers, Ginny with Nikki Sallis at a party in LA sipping from a bottle of Cristal. A recent piece in New York magazine repeated the story about her parents reining her in with threats of disinheritance, but the same piece also quoted friends saying that she had calmed down a lot anyway and was no longer ‘much fun to be around’. Ginny herself was quoted in an article as saying that she’d spent most of her teens wanting to be famous and now only wanted to be left alone. She’d done some acting and modelling, but had left all of that behind – fame was a disease, she’d said, and anyone who craved it was a moron. I read these articles over several times – and printed out the photos, which I stuck on my noticeboard.

Large chunks of time seemed to be drifting by now, during which I did nothing but idly surf the Net or sit on the couch and drink – becoming maudlin, confused, cranky.

When Gennady showed up on Friday morning, I was hungover. The mess in my apartment had gotten worse and I’m sure it didn’t smell too good either – though at the time that aspect of things wasn’t anything I was actually aware of. I was too miserable and sick to notice.

When Gennady arrived at the doorway and stood looking in at the chaos, my worst fear – or one of them, at any rate – was realized. I knew straightaway that Gennady was on MDT. I could tell from the alert expression on his face and even from the way he was standing. I knew, too, that my suspicion would be confirmed as soon as he opened his mouth.

‘What’s your problem, Eddie?’ he said, with a mirthless laugh, ‘are you depressed or something? Maybe you need some medication.’ He sniffed and made a face. ‘Or maybe you just need to get an air-conditioning unit in this place.’

It was clear even from those few sentences that his spoken English had improved dramatically. His accent was still quite strong, but his grasp of structures – grammar and syntax – had obviously undergone some rapid transformative process. I wondered how many of the five pills he’d already taken.

‘Hello, Gennady.’

I went over to the dining table, sat down and extracted a wad of cash from the brown paper bag. I started counting $100 bills, sighing wearily every couple of seconds. Gennady came into the room and wandered about for a while, surveying the mess. He came to a stop right in front of me.

‘That’s not very safe, Eddie,’ he said, ‘keeping all your money in a fucking paper bag. Someone might come in and steal it.’

I sighed again and said, ‘I don’t like banks.’ I handed him up the twenty-two five. He took it and put it into the inside pocket of his jacket. He walked over to my desk, turned around and leaned back against it.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘I want to talk to you about something.’

Here it came. I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach. But I tried to play dumb.

‘You didn’t like the treatment,’ I said, and then added, ‘It was just a draft.’

‘Fuck that,’ he said, with a dismissive gesture of the hand, ‘I’m not talking about that. And anyway, don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.’

‘What?’

‘Those pills I stole. Are you going to tell me you didn’t notice?’

‘What about them?’

‘What do you think? I want more.’

‘I don’t have any.’

He smiled, as though we were playing a game – which of course we were.

I shrugged my shoulders and said, ‘I don’t.’

He pushed himself up from the desk and walked over towards me. He stopped where he’d stopped before and slowly reached his hand back into the inside pocket of his jacket. I was scared, but didn’t flinch. He took out something which I couldn’t see properly. He looked at me, smiled again and then with rapid a motion of his hand released the blade of a long flick-knife. He placed the tip of the blade at the side of my neck and moved it up and down, scraping it gently against my skin. ‘I want some more,’ he said.

I swallowed. ‘Do I look like I have any more?’

He paused for a moment and stopped moving the knife, but didn’t withdraw it. I went on, ‘You’ve taken it, right? You know what it’s like, and what it does to you.’ I swallowed again, louder than before. ‘Look around you, does this strike you as the place of someone who’s taking the drug you took?’

‘Well, where did you get it from then?’

‘I don’t know, some guy I met in a-’

He jabbed the knife sharply against my neck and withdrew it quickly.

‘Ow!’

I put my hand up to the point where he’d jabbed me and rubbed it. There wasn’t any blood, but the jab had really hurt.

‘Don’t lie to me, Eddie, because – and make sure you understand this – if I don’t get what I want I’m going to kill you anyway…’ Then he set the point of the knife to just under my left eye, and pressed it in, gently but firmly. ‘And in stages.’

He continued pressing the knife, and when I could feel my eyeball starting to protrude, I whispered, ‘OK.’

He held the knife in place for a moment and then withdrew it.

‘I can get them,’ I said, ‘but it’ll take a few days. The guy who deals them is very… security conscious.’

Gennady clicked his tongue, as if to say go on.

‘I phone him, and he arranges a pick-up.’ I paused here and rubbed my left eye, but it was really to give me a moment to work out what I was going to say next. ‘If he catches a whiff of someone else getting involved in this, by the way – someone he doesn’t know – that’s it, we’ll never hear from him again.’

Gennady nodded.

‘And another thing,’ I said, ‘they’re expensive.’

I could tell that he was excited at the prospect of scoring. I could also tell that despite his heavy-handed tactics he would go along with whatever I proposed, and would pay whatever I asked.

‘How much?’

‘Five hundred a pop…’

He whistled, almost with glee.

‘… which is why I’m out of them. Because we’re not talking dime bags here.’

He looked at me, and then pointed at the money on the table. ‘Use that. Get me… er…’ – he paused, and seemed to be doing some calculations in his head – ‘… get me fifty or sixty of them. For starters.’

If I did end up giving him any, they would have to come from my stash, so I said, ‘The most I can get in one go is ten.’

‘Fuck that-’

‘Gennady, I’ll talk to the guy, but he’s very paranoid. We’ve got to take this slowly.’

He turned around and walked over to the desk, and then back again.

‘OK, when?’

‘I should be able to get them by next Friday.’

‘Next fucking Friday? You said a few days.’

‘I leave him a message. It takes a few days for him to get back to me. Then another few days to set it up.’

Gennady held the knife out again and pointed it directly in my face. ‘If you fuck with me, Eddie, you’ll be sorry.’

Then he put the knife away and walked over to the door.

‘I’m going to phone you Tuesday.’

I nodded.

‘OK. Tuesday.’

Standing in the doorway, and as though it were an afterthought, he said, ‘So what is this shit anyway? What’s in it?’

‘It’s a… smart-drug,’ I said, ‘I don’t really know what’s in it.’

‘It makes you smart?’

I held out my hands. ‘Well, yeah. Hadn’t you noticed?’ I was going to say something to him about his English and how it had improved, but I decided against it. He might get offended at the idea that I hadn’t thought his English was good to start with.

‘Sure,’ he said, ‘it’s amazing. What’s it called?’

I hesitated. ‘Er… MDT. It’s called MDT. It’s a chemical name, but… yeah.’

‘MDT?’

‘Yeah. You know, score some MDT. Do some MDT.’

He looked at me for a moment, dubiously, and then said, ‘Tuesday.’

He went out into the hallway, leaving the door open. I remained sitting in the chair and listened to him clumping down the stairs. When I heard the door of the building banging closed I stood up and went over to the window. I looked out and saw Gennady pacing along Tenth Street towards First Avenue. From the little I knew of him, the lightness in his step seemed, to say the least, uncharacteristic.

Looking back now – from the dead stillness of this room here in the Northview Motor Lodge – I can see that Gennady’s intrusion into my life, his attempt to muscle in on my supply of MDT, had quite an unsettling effect on me. I had lost nearly everything and I resented the idea that someone could so easily destroy what little there was left. I hadn’t wanted to take MDT at full throttle any more because I was scared of surrendering myself to another blackout, scared of being open again to that same level of darkness and unpredictability. But neither did I want to just give up and leave everything behind – and especially not for a circling vulture like Gennady to pick at and tear apart. Besides, the idea of Gennady on MDT seemed a complete waste to me. Suddenly the guy was able to speak comprehensible English? Big fucking deal. He was still a bonehead, a zhulik. MDT wasn’t going to change someone like him. Not the way it had changed me…

On foot of this realization, I decided I had to make one last effort. Maybe I could salvage something from the situation. Maybe I could even reverse it. I’d make another call to Donald Geisler and plead with him to talk to me.

What harm could it do?

I rooted out Vernon’s black notebook, found the number and dialled it

‘Yep?’

I paused for a second and then rushed into it.

‘This is Vernon Gant’s friend again, don’t hang up, please… five minutes, all I want is five minutes of your time, I’ll pay you…’ – this came to me on the spur of the moment – ‘… I’ll pay you five thousand dollars, a thousand dollars a minute, just talk to me…’

I stopped, and there was silence. As I waited, I stared over at the brown paper bag on the table.

He released a long sigh. ‘Jeesus!’

I didn’t know what this meant, but he hadn’t hung up on me. I decided not to push it. I remained silent.

Eventually, he said, ‘I don’t want your money.’ He paused again, and then said, ‘Five minutes.’

‘Thank you… very much.’

He gave me the address of a café on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope in Brooklyn and told me to meet him there in an hour. He was tall and would be wearing a plain yellow T-shirt.

I had a shower and shaved, knocked back a quick cup of coffee and some toast, and got dressed. I picked up a cab straightaway out on Tenth Street.

The café was small and dark and nearly empty. Sitting alone at a table in the corner was a tall man wearing a plain yellow T-shirt. He was drinking an espresso. Beside his cup, neatly stacked, he had a pack of Marlboros and a Zippo lighter. I introduced myself and sat down. From his greying hair and the lines around his eyes, I reckoned that Donald Geisler was about fifty-five years old. He had the tired, gruff demeanour of someone who’s been around the block a few times, and probably a few different blocks at that.

‘OK, then,’ he said, ‘what do you want?’

I gave him a quick and heavily edited version of events. At the end I said, ‘So what I really need to know about is dosage. Or, failing that, if you’ve heard of an associate of Vernon’s called Tom, or Todd.’

He nodded his head, pensively, and then stared at his espresso cup for a few moments. As I waited for him to gather his thoughts, or whatever it was he was doing, I took out my pack of Camels and lit one up.

I’d smoked more than half of the cigarette before Geisler spoke. It occurred to me that if we were supposed to be sticking to the five-minute rule, we were already way over time.

‘About three years ago,’ he said, ‘three and a half maybe, I met Vernon Gant. I was an actor at the time, with a small company I’d co-founded five years before that. We did Miller and Shepard and Mamet, that kind of thing. We had some success – especially with a production of American Buffalo. And we toured a lot.’

I knew immediately from the tone in his voice, as well as from the languid narrative route he appeared to be taking, that despite his earlier protests, he was in this for the long haul.

I discreetly ordered two more espressos from a passing waitress and lit up another cigarette.

‘Around the time I met Vernon was also when the company decided to change direction and mount a production of Macbeth – which I was going to take the lead in. And direct.’ He cleared his throat. ‘At the time, meeting Vernon seemed like a piece of really good luck – because here I am scared shitless at the prospect of doing Shakespeare and this guy is offering me… well, you know what he was offering me.’

Geisler’s delivery was slow and deliberate, his voice like gravel. It was an actor’s voice. I also got the impression, as he went on, that he had never spoken about this stuff to anyone before. His account of the early days of MDT was much fuller than Melissa’s had been but was essentially the same. In his case, he’d received the pitch from Vernon, been unable to resist and after a couple of 15mg doses had memorized the entire text of Macbeth – thoroughly intimidating his cast and crew in the process. He’d then gone on, over the early rehearsal period, to take a further dozen pills, an average of about three a week. The pills were unmarked, but Vernon’s partner, a guy called Todd, had shown up one day with Vernon and explained the dosage and something about what was in MDT and how it worked. This Todd character had also asked Geisler questions about how he was responding to the drug and if he’d been experiencing any adverse side-effects. Geisler had said that he hadn’t.

Two weeks before opening, and under intense pressure, Geisler had cleaned out what he had in the bank and upped his intake to six pills a week – ‘Nearly one a day,’ he said.

I wanted to ask him more about Todd and what he’d had to say about dosage – but at the same time I could see that Geisler was concentrating really hard and I didn’t want to interrupt his train of thought.

‘Then, in the few days before we were due to open, it happened – my life fell apart. From a Tuesday to a Friday. It just… fell apart.’

Up to this point, Geisler had kept both his hands under the table and out of view. I hadn’t thought anything of it, but now as he moved his right hand up and reached out to take his espresso cup, I saw that his hand had a slight but noticeable tremor. I thought at first that it might be a symptom of alcoholism, a morning-after shake, something like that, but when I saw him leaning forward, gripping the cup to make sure he got it up to his lips without spilling any of the coffee, I realized that he was probably suffering from some neurological disorder. He replaced the cup, very carefully, and then put himself through the laborious process of lighting a cigarette. He did this in silence, pointedly making no comment about the difficulty he was having. He knew I was watching, which almost turned it into a kind of performance.

Once he had his cigarette on the go, he said, ‘I was under a lot of pressure, rehearsing fourteen, fifteen hours a day… but then… before I know it, and out of the fucking blue, I’m having these periods of memory loss.’

I stared at him, nodding my head.

‘I lost track of what I was doing for hours at a time.’

Barely able to contain myself, I kept saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, go on, go on.’

‘I still don’t know what I got up to, exactly, during these… blackouts, I suppose you’d call them… all I know is that between the Tuesday and Friday of that week – and as a result of what I got up to – my girlfriend of ten years left me, the production of Macbeth was cancelled and I was thrown out of my apartment. I also ran over and nearly killed an eleven-year-old girl on Columbus Avenue.’

‘Jesus.’

My heart was racing.

‘I went to Vernon to try and find out what was happening to me, and at first he didn’t want to know, he was scared, but then he contacted Todd and we met up. Todd was the technical one – he worked for a pharmaceutical company. I could never figure out what their story was, but it soon became clear that Todd was siphoning this stuff out of the labs where he worked and that Vernon was just the front man. It also emerged that Vernon had mixed up a batch of tablets and had been dealing me 30- instead of 15mg pills, which meant that my dosage had shot up dramatically without me knowing it. Anyway, I told Todd what had happened and he said that I needed to combine the MDT with something else, another drug, something to counteract the side-effects. That’s what he called these blackouts – side-effects…’

‘What was the na-’

‘… but I told him I wasn’t taking anything else, that I wanted to stop, and to get back to normal. I asked him if I could do that, if I could just stop – without there being any other adverse side-effects, and he said he didn’t know, he wasn’t the FDA, but that since I’d been on such a high dosage he wouldn’t recommend stopping outright. He said I should probably reduce my intake gradually.’

I nodded.

‘Which is what I did. But not systematically, not according to any known clinical procedure.’ ‘And what happened?’

‘I was fine for a while, but then this started…’ – he held up his hands – ‘… and then… insomnia, nausea, chest and sinus infections, loss of appetite, constipation, dry mouth, erectile dysfunction.’

He threw his hands up, this time in a gesture of despair.

I didn’t know what to say to him, and we were both silent for a while. I still wanted answers to my original two questions, but at the same time I didn’t want to be insensitive.

After a moment, Geisler said, ‘Look, I’m not blaming anyone but myself. No one forced me to take MDT.’ He shook his head, and went on. ‘I guess I was a guinea pig, though, because I bumped into Vernon about a year later and he told me they’d sorted out any dosage problems they’d been having, that dosage had to be individually adjusted – customized, he said.’ A sudden look of anger came into his face. ‘He even suggested I might like to try it again, but I told him to go fuck himself.’

I tried to nod sympathetically.

I also waited to see if he was going to say anything else. When it appeared that he wasn’t, I said, ‘This Todd guy, do you know his surname? Or anything about him? Which company he worked for?’

Geisler shook his head.

‘I only ever met him two or three times anyway. He was very circumspect, very careful. He and Vernon were some act, I’ll tell you – but Todd was definitely the brains.’

I fiddled with the pack of Camels on the table beside my espresso cup.

‘One more question,’ I said. ‘When Todd told you that you needed to combine the MDT with something else, with another drug, to counteract the side-effects, the memory loss… did he say what that drug might be?’

‘Yes.’

My heart jumped.

‘What was it?’

‘I actually remember it very well, because he kept on about it, telling me that it would take care of the problem, that he’d just worked it out. It was a product called Dexeron. It’s an antihistamine and is used for treating certain allergies. It contains some… thing, some agent, that reacts with a specific receptor complex in the brain and in a way, he claimed, that would prevent the blackouts from happening. I don’t know exactly. I don’t remember the details of what he said. I don’t think I understood it at the time. But apparently you can get it over the counter.’

‘You didn’t ever use it, though?’

‘No.’

‘I see.’

I nodded my head, as though I were considering this – but all I was thinking about now was getting out of there as fast as possible and getting to a pharmacy.

‘… anyway, then, after Janine left me and I was kicked out of the company,’ Geisler went on, ‘I tried to pick up the pieces, but that wasn’t so easy, because of course…’

I drained my coffee and desperately tried to formulate an exit strategy in my head. Even though I felt sorry for Geisler, and was horrified at what had happened to him, I really didn’t need to hear this part of the story – but I couldn’t just stand up and leave, either, so I ended up smoking two more cigarettes before I found the courage to say that I had to go.

I told him thanks and said I’d get the check on the way out. He looked at me, as if to say C’mon, sit down, have another cigarette, drink some more coffee, but then a second later he waved a hand at me, dismissively, and said, ‘Oh, go on, get out of here. And good luck. I suppose.’

I found a pharmacy on Seventh Avenue, a few doors up from the café, and bought two packs of Dexeron. I then took a cab home.

Once in the apartment I made straight for the bedroom closet and took out the MDT pills. I wasn’t sure how many to take, and I deliberated on it for quite a while. I eventually decided to take three. This was my last chance and it would either work or it wouldn’t.

I went into the kitchen and got a glass of water. I swallowed the three MDT pills in one go, and then took two of the Dexeron. After that, I went in and sat on the couch, and waited.

Two hours later, my CDs were back in alphabetical order. There were also no more crushed pizza-boxes to be seen in the apartment, or empty beer cans, or dirty socks… and every single inch of surface space was polished and gleaming…