Kevin scoffed. “Don’t you get it? The e-mails came from Mallory, who is scheming-probably with Highsmith’s help-to create a bogus paper trail that makes it look like you have a mistress.”
“I don’t think Mallory would do that.”
“Oh, get a grip, will you?”
“I’m serious. Mallory has a lot of resentment toward me-enough to put spyware on my computer. But make up evidence? That isn’t even close to the woman I married.”
Kevin came toward me, laying his hand on my shoulder. “Michael, Ivy is dead. She is not JBU.”
“There’s one way to find out.”
He knew what I meant. “If you go to the Rink Bar at four o’clock, you will be playing right into Highsmith’s hands. He will cite it as proof that you have a lover, and that the two of you are plotting to hide your assets from Mallory. As your lawyer, I absolutely forbid you to go.”
“I don’t care,” I said, looking him in the eye. “I’m going.”
30
A FEW MINUTES BEFORE FOUR P.M., TONY GIRELLI WAS SEATED ALONE at a café table at the Rink Bar outside Rockefeller Center.
Every spring when the ice melted and the Zamboni went into storage, the famous skating rink in front of the gold statue of Prometheus became a popular lunch and happy-hour destination. A scattering of brightly colored umbrellas shaded tables for about six hundred margarita-loving patrons. Above them at street level, the year-round swarm of tourists stood at the rail, people watching. Girelli took it all in. His boss had extensive commercial real estate holdings, and Girelli wondered if he owned a piece of this place.
Real estate, however, was a sore subject for Girelli.
“Sparkling water,” he told the waiter. “With lemon.”
Girelli still carried a copy of a certain blast e-mail in his wallet, one that he-and hundreds of guys like him-had received last fall from a trader at the residential mortgage desk at Saxton Silvers. As per Michael Cantella, it read, we will no longer be purchasing NINA loans. Please do not call. No exceptions will be granted. At the time of that announcement, Girelli had been pulling down $125,000 in commissions-a month. He and his buddies would go into Miami Beach clubs almost every night, order four or five bottles of Cristal champagne at $1,500 a pop, and think nothing of it. Not bad for a guy who had once been flat broke but who was determined never to return to the world of a leg-breaking, brass-knuckled debt collector for the mob. He’d been shooting pool at a bar one night when a buddy had asked, “Wanna be a mortgage broker?” and he’d jumped on it.
Girelli’s specialty had been NINA loans-“no income, no assets”-for, as he put it, “people who didn’t have a pot to piss in.” He’d load up an eight-dollar-an-hour housekeeper with a million dollars in mortgages on six houses, one for everyone in her family, including two sisters who were still trying to get here from Mexico. And what self-respecting taxi driver should be without three or four pre-construction-priced condos on Miami Beach? The loans were destined to go into default, of course, but that wasn’t Girelli’s problem. He teamed up with a buddy at Sunpath Bank, and they borrowed at a 30 to 1 ratio-$100 million against $3 million in capital-to fund all the subprime loans they wrote. Then Sunpath bundled all the subprimes together and sold them up the daisy chain to Wall Street, paying back Sunpath’s lenders with Wall Street’s money and keeping the profit. What a hoot. What a party. Until the e-maiclass="underline"
As per Michael Cantella…
Never mind that Sunpath had already funded yet another $100 million in subprime loans in “business as usual.” Never mind that there was no way to pay back Sunpath’s lenders unless Wall Street bought the bundles. Girelli and his partner tried other investment banks, but Wall Street firms were like sheep: The minute a leader like Saxton Silvers decided to stop buying NINA loans, they all followed suit. Funny thing was, no one in the subprime pipeline had ever heard of this asshole Michael Cantella. The guy didn’t even have direct supervision over the residential mortgage desk at Saxton Silvers. Some even said that the e-mail’s attribution, “As per Michael Cantella,” was just Kent Frost and his subprime factory taking a swipe at Cantella for sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. Whatever the case, the plug was pulled. Sunpath closed its doors in a week. Three hundred employees lost their jobs. The people at the top lost everything. Michael Cantella didn’t even know their names.
Girelli intended to keep it that way.
“Here you are, sir,” said the waiter.
Girelli squeezed the lemon and discreetly surveyed the crowd. Michael Cantella was nowhere to be seen, and in light of the disclosure of the e-mails at this afternoon’s court hearing, Girelli doubted that Cantella’s divorce lawyer would let him go to a secret meeting that was no longer a secret.
Wasting my damn time here.
The thought had barely registered when Girelli spotted a woman approaching the table referenced in the e-mail, the one right in front of the gold statue of Prometheus.
A tight smiled creased his lips.
Pay dirt.
31
I WAS AT STREET LEVEL, STANDING AT THE RAIL THAT SURROUNDED THE concrete hole in the ground at Rockefeller Center, looking down on the Rink Bar. Had it been December, I would have been crushed beneath a ninety-foot-tall Norway spruce and five miles of twinkling lights.
On reflection, I’d decided that Kevin might be right: The e-mails from “JBU” might all be a setup to help Mallory prove that I was having an affair. Might be right. It wasn’t enough to keep me from going to the Rink Bar at the designated time. It was enough, however, to make me take precautions.
Two reporters had hounded me all the way out of the courthouse, a constant peppering of questions about Saxton Silvers. I figured it was only going to get worse as the media buzz honed the link between me and the firm’s downfall. If I was going to the Rink Bar, I needed to be unrecognizable, but my suitcase full of socks and underwear didn’t offer much in the way of a disguise. I stopped by the Days Inn and borrowed Papa’s trench coat. The hem was frayed, the elbow was patched, and part of the lining was torn and hanging out of the sleeve. My guess was that he’d purchased it before I was born. He also loaned me a white golf cap with the red, white, and green Italian flag sewn onto it, his latest acquisition from Mulberry Street. It hadn’t been my intention, but I could have passed for a homeless guy.
The last two days had been nuts on every level-too crazy for me to give serious consideration to Mallory’s accusations. She was wrong: I did love her. But she was also right: I had not stopped loving Ivy. Maybe that kept me from loving Mallory enough. Love was Nothing if it wasn’t the truth, and in my case the truth was painfuclass="underline" nothing compared to what I had felt for Ivy. If that made me a bad person, I hoped Mallory would forgive me. But if Ivy was still alive, I hoped she would forgive me, too-and tell me who or what had made her vanish four years ago.
And why was she coming back now?
“Excuse me, but would you take our picture?”
A young woman wearing a University of Wisconsin sweatshirt was shoving a camera in my face. Her girlfriends were already posed at the rail.
“Sure,” I said.
I took a few steps back and aimed the zoom lens. I was facing east, toward the Fifth Avenue entrance, looking out over the top of the Rink Bar below us. Flags of the United Nations’ 192 member states encircled the rink area and flapped in the breeze. I zoomed in, then out-then in again.
“Tell us when,” the woman said.
I wasn’t focused on them. I zoomed in over their heads, peering between the flags of Japan and Jamaica. On the other side of the plaza, a man was standing in the second-story window above Dean & DeLuca. It was the perfect vantage point from which to look down into the Rink Bar. He was almost entirely concealed by the curtains he was standing behind, but I noticed him because of the camera with the long telephoto lens in his hands. This afternoon’s hearing had apparently expanded the media interest beyond me and Saxton Silvers to me and Mallory.