When he paused, a palpable silence took hold of the apartment. There was no traffic noise, no whirring of the building’s machinery, no humming of appliances. I kept very still and took slow breaths and focused my eyes on the wall behind Burrows, afraid that, like a deer, any stray motion or sound or even the force of my gaze might spook him and break the spell. Burrows leaned forward, his forearms resting on his thighs, the water glass still before him, held in both his hands. He peered inside, as if into a deep well.
“You’d think he was the best friend you’d ever had-smart, funny, worldly, and infinitely understanding of human failings. If you had a vice, a weakness, a little character tic, well, Gerard had plenty too. And whatever yours were, you’d never get even a raised eyebrow from him. Just a wink and a nod, as if to say ‘It’s no big deal. Go ahead. Enjoy. That’s what men do.’ And he’d sit back and wait and watch. To see the kind of women you liked, or men, to see what you envied, what made you bitter, to see what you liked and hated about yourself, to see what lies you told yourself, and, especially, to see what you most coveted. It could take months, years even. He didn’t care. He was patient. It was like tending a garden, he used to say.”
Burrows looked up, and the motion startled me. His eyes were red. “This is too vague, isn’t it? You want to know what he was like, how he did business. You need specifics.” Burrows’s soft, deep voice was steady now, and it stayed that way through all the stories he told me.
Chapter Ten
“Larry-let’s call him Larry-had just moved to town from somewhere in the Midwest, with his brand-new wife in tow. Larry was ambitious, and lucky. He had the world by the balls. And he had no clue at all of what was about to happen to him.” Burrows found the rhythm of his narrative easily, and I got the feeling he’d waited a long time to tell his stories. His tone was ironical and detached. The irony seemed to come naturally to him. He had to work at the detachment.
“Larry had just landed a job trading currency for one of the biggest FX market-makers on the Street. He’d been a rising star at the regional bank that he’d come from, but, after all, it was just a regional bank-a farm team. This was the big league, and the FX market was hot back then. Larry was poised to make some real money. And that was a good thing, because Mrs. Larry, his pretty new wife, had pricey tastes, lofty social aspirations, and a grim resolve. Of the many things she wanted, at the top of her list was a place to live. But not just any place. Mrs. Larry imagined raising a towheaded brood in just the right sort of Manhattan apartment. Something on Park Ave., say, no higher than Eightieth Street, or maybe on Fifth, with a terrace and a nice view of the park.
“Now, Larry had come to town with what he’d thought was a tidy nest egg. But in New York City, in the midst of the real estate boom twenty years ago, it was chump change. Mrs. Larry had set her sights on only the toniest white-glove buildings, places with the pickiest boards… places that required that all apartments be purchased in cash. Much more cash than Larry had on hand, and more than he was likely to see-in the best of circumstances-for nearly a year, when his bonus would be paid. This did not please Mrs. Larry, whose strengths ran more to petulance and pouting than to patience. And Mrs. Larry was generous with her displeasure.
“Enter Nassouli. He had started cultivating Larry on the boy’s first day at his new job. We were active in the FX markets, and Gerard made it a point to keep abreast of the comings and goings of traders at all the big market makers. He was especially interested in new, young traders. ‘Fertile ground,’ he called them.
“It took Nassouli all of a lunch with Larry, a dinner with him and the missus, and a boys’ night out at a strip club to suss out the dynamics of Larry’s domestic scene and the powerful forces at work on him there. Larry was a sitting duck. In short order, Nassouli had set himself up as the Larrys’ Big Apple mentor, showing them the ropes, opening doors, introducing them to all the right people and all the right places. Within a week he’d delivered them into the clutches of a realtor friend of his, who proceeded to show Mrs. Larry only top-of-the-line apartments in top-of-the-line buildings, all of which-wonder of wonders-had strict, cash-only policies. Six weeks and a hundred or so apartments later, they had found the place-Seventy-fourth and Park, ten rooms, terraces, views-the whole ball of wax. Mrs. Larry would not be denied. Larry’s problems came suddenly to a head.
“Ah, but there was his great, good friend Gerard, with such an easy solution to it alclass="underline" a personal loan to the Larrys for the amount in question. And just to make sure that Larry’s financial statements would pass muster before even the pickiest co-op board, Nassouli would pay the loan into an account-in Larry’s name-at MWB. This account would have a very large balance and would appear, to whoever might ask, to have held this balance for quite some time. On top of all this, for good measure, Nassouli could arrange for some impressive letters of recommendation for the Larrys-from prominent people, famous people even, people who hadn’t a clue as to who the Larrys were, but who owed Gerard some heavy favors.
“Larry offered only token resistance, and charming, affable, worldly, plugged-in Gerard blew through it like tissue paper. ‘Not to worry, dear boy, really. You have a cash-flow problem-a timing issue. This is just a bridge loan. Happens all the time… this is how things get done here in the big city.’ And as must happen in such cases, Larry was complicit in his own corruption. He believed what Nassouli told him-bought into it all-because Nassouli told him precisely what he’d wanted to hear. And that was all it took to make Larry a party to fraud and conspiracy and violations of who knows how many of his employer’s rules of conduct.
“Two months later, the Larrys had closed on the place. Mrs. Larry was pleased, but it passed quickly. Now she had to grapple with renovation and decoration, and this left Larry, once again, to grapple with his lack of cash. But again, kindly Uncle Gerard came to the rescue. ‘Remember that account at MWB-the one in your name? Just think of it as a credit line, dear boy, draw what you need… pay it back later… whenever you can.’ Larry didn’t muster even token resistance this time. Then later came.
“Bonus time eventually rolled around. Larry had had a great year, and the FX markets continued to be hot, so his bonus was a big one. But not big enough to settle accounts with Nassouli. Between the purchase of the apartment and his wife’s many improvements, Larry was deep in the hole. But money wasn’t what Gerard was looking for. What he had in mind instead was having a tame FX trader in his pocket, someone on a major market-making desk, someone who, every now and then, could do some little favors for him. Like providing some ‘insight’ into his bank’s positions and trading strategies, or executing the occasional off-market trade. Nine months after his first lunch with Gerard Nassouli, that’s what Larry became.
“He was one of maybe a dozen pet traders that Gerard had on file back then. Except in the particulars, the basic story was always the same. And with every ‘favor’ they did for Nassouli, they got in deeper and deeper, until they were completely his creatures.” Burrows shook his head a little.
“Not one of them was particularly likeable. You couldn’t really feel sorry for them. It was a simple quid pro quo. They’d made their deals with the devil, and they got what they’d deserved. A few of them seemed actually happy with the arrangement. But for most of them… it consumed them. You could see it happen over the course of months and years. It was like a cancer. At first it was a little secret thing, a small, dark corner, a little hunger that had to be fed, and not very often. But they’d get in deeper and the hunger would grow and grow and be more insistent, until the rest of their lives became irrelevant, and only the secret thing remained.