Probably just as well. Guy like Mesh got unhappy with you, he might do worse than just stop doing business with you
“What’ll you have?” The bartender wiped down the spot in front of Perlow, though it was plenty clean. Just a way to keep his arm occupied, something to do while waiting for an
A beer, Perlow was about to say, make it a Heineken, but the door swung open then and Simon Kurnit walked through it
It didn’t register at first. Perlow, from the office — all right, everyone at Quilibrium worked late some nights, though this late was pretty extreme. And the guy next to him who glanced up and quickly turned away — just a guy, though there was something about him. Kurnit stood in the doorway, holding onto the door, thinking, I can’t just walk out, it would be rude, but also thinking that the last thing he wanted right now was company, was Perlow from the office, was—
Then it did register. The turtleneck. The sideburns. The face. Perlow, glancing over now at the other man, a look of panic flashing across his face. It was a moment of complete clarity. It felt to Kurnit as if he’d been walking on the surface of a frozen lake and, without warning, plunged through into the icy water beneath.
“You — You—” he said, but Perlow was facing the other way, raising his hands, saying something to the other man, who was reaching into his windbreaker with one hand, pulling out a black handgun, leveling it at Kurnit. Perlow was saying, No, you can’t shoot him, we need him, and wrestling for the gun, one hand on the man’s wrist, the other on the barrel itself, and the words “we need him” went echoing around in Kurnit’s head.
He didn’t move. He was rooted to the spot, watching the men fight over the gun, and it was only when the gun-shot exploded in the confined space, smashing a bottle and sending Perlow backward over his stool in a spray of blood, that Kurnit found his legs again. He stumbled back against the door and fell into the hall outside as a second bullet splintered the doorframe. Getting to his feet, he scrambled for the stairs, grabbed the narrow banister, and flew down, two steps at a time, slipping, almost falling, ducking his head as he heard the clatter of footsteps behind him. He reached the landing, used the banister to pull himself through a tight 180-degree turn, and started down the steep second flight to the street.
Halfway down he missed a step. He felt his heart catch, his breath stop. He swayed for a moment in midair, tipping forward, headlong. It was suddenly silent, it seemed to him — there were no more footfalls, no shouted voices behind him, just the world tilted precariously and swinging up at him. He put out a hand to catch himself, and his fingertips raked a row of framed black-and-white photos of forgotten Irish tenors off the wall as he fell.
He felt his leg snap under him, but when he came to rest against the street door at the foot of the stairs, he was only conscious of the pain in a distant way. He was facing up, and he watched as a pair of sneakers came into view on the highest step he could see, then the legs of a pair of brown corduroy pants, then a hand holding onto the banister, a plastic Duane Reade bag hanging from its wrist. The man kept coming, picking his steps now with care. The zipped-up bottom of the windbreaker descended into view, then the other hand with its gun, the barrel pointed down at him, and finally the man’s chest and face. Kurnit’s heart was racing, fluttering; maybe he was going into shock. He watched the gun barrel come up and the finger tighten on the trigger and then the second pair of feet at the top of the stairs, and the second pair of legs, and the second gun, this one a long-barreled shot-gun. And the man before him, the one who had murdered Maureen, the one his own company — my God — had paid to murder Maureen (No, you can’t shoot him, we need him), the man who was going to kill him, too, this man spun to face the threat behind him and lost his balance and may well have died from the fall, but the blast from the bartender’s shotgun didn’t give him the chance.
In the hospital, Kurnit refused visitors, refused newspapers. He only turned the television on to watch Jeopardy!, and even regretted doing that the one time a teaser for the evening news showed footage of Michael Steinbach leaving a courthouse, Stephen Neville at his elbow.
He hesitated at the door to Steinbach’s office. The cast had come off and he’d switched from crutches to a cane, but he still felt it each time he put weight on the leg, and he took a moment to arrange himself before he lifted the handle of the cane and used it to rap sharply against the wood.
“What?” Steinbach shouted.
Kurnit turned the knob and went in. He knew Steinbach was alone; his assistant had left at 5:30 and no one else had gone in during the half hour he’d been watching.
He limped across the office to Steinbach’s desk, where the man waited, his face showing no expression except perhaps a trace of impatience. There was a chair off to one side of the desk, and Kurnit lowered himself into it, extended his left leg so the knee wasn’t bent. It stiffened up less that way.
Steinbach stared at him, dissecting him. Kurnit stared back. He’d thought he wouldn’t have the patience for this, but suddenly he found himself extremely calm.
“We’re glad you’re back, Simon,” Steinbach finally said.
“I just want to know one thing,” Kurnit said, and his voice didn’t shake at all. “How could you do it? How could you possibly...?”
“I don’t know what got into Perlow’s head,” Steinbach said. “He must have—”
“No,” Kurnit shot back. “No. Not Perlow. You. Perlow did what you told him to do. That’s all he ever did.”
“I never told Perlow to hire anyone to kill Maureen. I would never—”
“Stop it. Stop it. I’m not an idiot. You always say you hire people because of how smart they are, so how about treating me like it? I’m not wearing a wire, we’re the only people here, and I want an answer. I think you owe me that.”
Steinbach’s eyes flicked back and forth across his. He was hunting for something. Trying to decide whether Kurnit was lying or not? He wasn’t, and Steinbach apparently satisfied himself that this was the case.
Steinbach turned back to his desk, hunted briefly through one of the stacks of papers, found a recent P&L report, and tossed it at him. “Strategies you developed or worked on generated $84 million over the first eleven months of this year. You’re a valuable employee.”
“So... you kill my wife?”
“I didn’t kill anyone,” Steinbach said. “But speaking hypothetically? For $84 million? Let’s analyze this rationally. Put some numbers to it.” He leaned back in his chair. “With her alive, we have a zero percent chance of keeping you. Remove her and your main incentive to leave has been eliminated. Now, there is some chance, call it twenty-five percent, that you decide to leave anyway, maybe quit working entirely, and there’s maybe another twenty percent chance that the whole thing blows up and you find out what happened, but that leaves a fifty-five percent chance of keeping you, and those are better odds than we’ve had on trades that ended up making us a lot money. You tell me, what would the fair price be of an option that improved the odds from zero to fifty-five percent of keeping a man capable of generating $84 million a year? Actually—” he tapped on the screen of his PDA a few times, dividing and multiplying, “$91.6 million if you annualize. I haven’t run Black-Scholes, but I can tell you it’s worth a hell of a lot more than the sum of what Randall Mesh, Stephen Neville, and the Edison Hotel charged. Now, you’ve got to factor in the risk-adjusted cost of fighting the charges if things do blow up — as they did — and that’s not cheap. And then you’ve got to assign some amount to the catastrophic risk, however small, of going to jail. But it still comes out an expected-value winner.”