35
TONY GIRELLI WENT FOR A RIDE. HE WAS SEATED IN THE PASSENGER seat of a new Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder, and Jason Wald was driving 80 mph-cruising speed for 520 horsepower-across the Triborough Bridge. It seemed that every time Girelli saw Wald, the kid had a new set of extremely fast wheels. Business was obviously good at Ploutus Investments, and it never hurt to be Kyle McVee’s favorite nephew-even if you were a sorry replacement for his dead son.
“Where we going?” asked Girelli. He had to shout over the rumble of the engine.
“Queens,” said Wald.
No shit, thought Girelli, but he didn’t press for specifics. Self-esteem for punks like Wald came from holding all details close to the vest-even the details they were too stupid to recognize as meaningless. Girelli figured they were headed to a debriefing about what had gone down at the Rink Bar. If information was power, Girelli held it for now. Only he knew that the chaos had all started when he’d used the name “Vanessa.”
“Nice car,” said Girelli.
“You want to drive it?”
“Sure.”
“Blow me.”
It was a familiar banter from better days between the two men, back when they used to hang out in Miami Beach and party with the skinny models on Ocean Drive who would give it up to any guy with money after two Red Bulls and vodka. That was during the subprime heyday, when Girelli was pulling down $125,000 per month and Wald was raking in ten times that much on thousands of mortgages he purchased from guys like Girelli and sold to Kent Frost and others on Wall Street. When the infamous e-mail from Saxton Silvers-As per Michael Cantella-had ended all that, Wald and Girelli vowed to nail that son of a bitch.
They got off the bridge. Wald steered the Lamborghini around the sharp corner and into an alley, pulling up to the rear entrance of a body shop. It was well after business hours, and all of the paint and body shops on the block were closed. The garage doors were shut, iron burglar bars covered the remaining doors and windows, and coils of razor wire ran like a giant, deadly Slinky along the top of a ten-foot chain-link fence. It wasn’t exactly the ideal neighborhood in which to park a $250,000 Italian sports car at night.
Wald tapped the horn, the garage door opened, and they pulled inside. He killed the engine, and with the push of a button the doors on either side opened at an upward angle like the wings of a butterfly. The two men climbed out of the car as the garage door closed behind them.
Girelli’s radar was at full alert. He’d gone on rides like this before-to warehouses and body shops in Queens-but never as the guest of honor. But he wasn’t worried. Girelli was packing a fully loaded Beretta 9 mm pistol, and Jason Wald was a dolt. That was two strikes against the home team, and the game wasn’t even under way.
“Glad you could make it, Tony.”
Girelli turned, unable to see the man standing off to the side in the shadows, but the distinctive accent was enough to give him pause. Two against one was no problem, unless one of the two was who he thought it was.
The silhouette took a half step forward, and then, with the flick of his lighter, he removed himself from the dark. Girelli’s pulse raced, his fears confirmed by the instantly recognizable face-or more specifically, by that deformed right ear.
The last person Girelli wanted to see tonight was Ian Burn.
36
I WASTED THE RIDE BACK FROM LONG ISLAND. I SHOULD HAVE PUT the top down on the Mini Cooper, cranked up just enough heat to take off the chill, and felt the wind on my face as the lights of Manhattan and the world’s most recognizable skyline swallowed me up. When I bought my convertible, I had signed a contract stating that I would drive it 90 percent of the time with the roof open. It was a marketing joke, but the way things were going, I wondered if they might actually sue me.
Yes, I was sweating the small stuff-like where the hell I was going to sleep tonight.
The Saxton Silvers parking garage was my destination, mainly because it was free and I still hadn’t straightened out my cash flow. To get there, I had to pass the firm’s main entrance on Seventh Avenue. Television crews, photographers, and a phalanx of other people crowded the sidewalk outside the revolving doors, and a line of double-parked media vans hugged the curb. A small but vocal group of demonstrators marched in a circle in the middle of all this. Anger was all over their faces, even angrier words on their handmade signs:
CROOKS!
SCREW YOUR BONUS. WHERE’S MY PENSION?
I was suddenly thinking of Ivy again and that day we’d stumbled into the FTAA riots in Miami. I rounded the block and pulled into the garage.
My Mini made a funny noise when I shut off the engine. To me, it definitely sounded like the carburetor, except that I hadn’t owned a car with a carburetor since I dumped the 1975 Monte Carlo after B-school. That was how much I knew about auto mechanics.
Apparently, about as much as I knew about Ivy.
Mallory had been right: Over the last four years I’d fooled myself into thinking that I had moved on, but I hadn’t. Perhaps my reaction now should have been one of sheer joy: Ivy is alive! There was some of that, to be sure. But it was much more complicated.
Why did you run, Ivy?
The funny noise in my engine stopped, but I remained in my car, thinking. I still hadn’t resolved the small things, but now it was the big stuff that consumed me. My personal portfolio had vanished into cyberspace. Saxton Silvers stock had dropped 90 percent in value. The FBI seemed to think that I was the traitor who’d used Chuck Bell and the power of FNN to bring down my own firm. Bell was now dead, and I was apparently being blamed for that, too. To top it all off, my wife was divorcing me over a dead woman who-suddenly-was no longer dead.
The timing of it all made me consider a dark possibility: What if Ivy didn’t share the joy I felt over a potential reunion? What if she had come back from the dead, so to speak, only to visit on Michael Cantella a fate worse than death?
Couldn’t be. Or could it?
My thoughts drifted back four years to our sailing trip and the dream I had told her about-the one about riding my bicycle on a dark highway, getting run off the road, and rushing my injured dog Tippy to the DQ. The gist of that strange dream had actually happened: A week before our trip, a black SUV had knocked me into a ravine and left me for dead. Afterward-and this was the reason for the nightmares-I wondered if the driver had been a Wall Street loser with a score to settle.
It’s only gonna get worse. That had been the warning from the anti-FTAA demonstrator who pulled me from the taxi in Miami. I had always wondered if he was really just talking about corporate greed. Was it possible that the same maniac had followed us to the Bahamas and played some role in Ivy’s disappearance? Again, I had to ask:
Why did you come back, Ivy?
Were the last few days payback for ruining her life? Did she finally emerge from hiding only to move my money into an offshore account and make me out as the villain behind the destruction of Saxton Silvers? Did she also destroy my marriage? Was she done with me yet? Those were terrible thoughts about a woman I loved. But with four years to plan it, Ivy was definitely smart enough to implement such a scheme, and with her birthday-orene52/25enero-at the root of my passwords, I had to consider the possibility. And after all, I couldn’t shake the memory that, in my dream, the hit-and-run driver of the SUV had been Ivy.
Stop it. Ivy would never-
My phone rang. It was Eric Volke. He and our CEO had spent the last twelve hours at the New York Federal Reserve in downtown Manhattan, in a room once used to cash coupons on Treasury bills. On the other side of the table had been the masters of the world’s biggest economy-the Federal Reserve chairman, the secretary of the treasury, the New York Fed chief, and the Securities and Exchange Commission chief.