I went online to see if there was any news about the murder; it was all over the Internet already. Because of fear and uncertainty about the future, Delivero’s stock was tanking in the pre-market, down below a dollar a share. It was like a dream come true — it had become a penny stock. I put in an order to cover my short position at the market open. I stood to make about four million dollars. I just hoped the authorities didn’t freeze my accounts before I could have the money wired to me in Mexico.
Then I checked my e-mail and almost passed out. There was a new message from one of the e-mail addresses that I’d suspected Silver had been using. The note read:
DIE IN PAIN ALONE YOU COCKSUCKING BASHING ASSHOLE
I stared at the screen for a few minutes, realizing the huge mistake I’d made. It wasn’t Silver who’d been harassing me. The real scumbag was probably one of the hundreds of people I’d pissed off with my bashings.
I was a mess for a while, then I got even. I went to the Yahoo Delivero message board and rubbed it in to the dumbasses who were giving me all their money. I was in the middle of one of my best posts ever when the cops started banging on my front door.
Part IV
Global markets
The enlightenment of Magnus McKay
by John Burdett
And the harlots will go into the kingdom of God before you
Matthew 21:31
Bangkok, Thailand
Wall Street, New York, Monday, February 28, 2005
Magnus McKay, alpha male, writes: Lalita, teelak — that does mean “darling” in Thai, right? — I miss you. I know this sounds ridiculous, but those two short moments we spent together have touched something inside of me. I’m going to bring you here as soon as possible, if I can’t find an excuse to visit Thailand next week (I’m working on it). Will you wait for me? Magnus.
He sits back in his executive chair to rub his jaw, then he stands up to look down on the ants bundled up against the cold on the Street.
He is not officially the senior partner of Weisman, Constant and Draper, so they had to give him the second corner office. Nevertheless, here we have power expressed through space: seven hundred square feet, two sets of windows. He’d chosen the crimson trimmings to go with his famous suspenders, the rest he’d left to the interior designer.
Musing: Does his draft e-mail hit the right tone or not? Hookers are no different to everyone else, right? You adapt human resources techniques to make them feel special, and if they’re good you give them a glittering prize to aim for. Not that Lalita’s performances in that seedy short-time hotel had been in any way deficient. To tell the truth, he hasn’t stopped thinking about her for the past three days.
Reminiscing with twinges: She was beautiful, far too beautiful for that cheap go-go dive where he found her, quite by accident. He had been with Samson Lee’s main man in Thailand, Tallboy Yip. Normally, McKay would never take his pleasure so down market, for, as a frequent traveler to Bangkok, he had joined the best, most discreet, and most expensive of the city’s brothels; but Yip, who these days was almost as wide as he was tall — with thick degenerate lips in a lived-in mug — owned low-life tastes.
McKay had been on the point of making excuses and going back to his hotel, when he’d seen her gyrating around that stainless steel pole on the revolving platform with all the other girls, her long black hair reaching to the small of her back. When she passed by the second time he deliberately smiled at her. On the third turn she deliberately smiled at him. Within the law of contract his offer had been accepted: They had a deal. He bought her a triple tequila because she asked him to.
His first thought had been to use her merely as an excuse to lose Tallboy, for he was not really in the mood, having sated his lust in a threesome the night before. He paid her bar fine after ten minutes of talking to her, then said goodnight to Yip with a lecherous smirk which Yip appreciated: Uncontrollable lust was always an acceptable reason for cutting a drinking bout short. Magnus had let her lead him up a set of squalid stairs to the room, following her perfect body from behind. He watched her undress automatically in front of him; long hair covering dark-brown nipples when she stood up straight to face him; he noted that she was smiling with just the right amount of shyness. Should he have her after all, or should he merely pay her modest fee and leave without taking his pleasure? She saw his hesitation and went to work on him. Magnus McKay, veteran womanizer and whoremonger, had never known anything like it. He gave her a hundred-dollar tip. She took it in the spirit it was meant: a symbol of his intent to return for more.
The next night had been his last in Bangkok and he really didn’t have time for her; but he made time for her anyway, between checkout and airport. It was uncanny, she seemed to know more about his libido than he did. It was magic, no other word for it. This time he gave her five hundred dollars: serious money. They talked briefly, like business people, about the possibility of her making regular visits to New York at his expense: say once a month, business class. She immediately undertook to get a passport, as if she had been expecting such an offer. They exchanged e-mail addresses. That was only three days ago.
He checks himself in a crimson-framed mirror behind his chair. He knows how Thai girls like her think: a farang a foreigner, a lawyer who works on Wall Street, a forty-one-year-old bachelor in perfect shape who could solve her financial problems and those of her family with one flash of his platinum credit card.
A fool would succumb to narcissism, remind himself what an incredible catch he must be for a Third World hooker (tall, slim, handsome, rich, charm-enhanced American); but Magnus knows better than that. Hunting is what makes him run. In work he hunts for money, in women he hunts for that extreme performance which you only extract from a girl who believes she has found the answer to her prayers and a meal ticket for life. Magnus would play that white knight role perfectly, and, if she played her cards right, he would certainly give her the golden handshake when he grew bored. Hell, he probably would solve most of her financial problems, how much could it cost? Twenty grand, fifty at most? In the old days he’d spent that on crack in a week, and she was better than crack. Another twinge forces him to wrench consciousness out of his groin chakra.
Back facing his computer, he clicks on send, logs off of his personal account with Yahoo Mail, and, switching with ruthless discipline to his work mindset, returns to his business e-mail.
His sorting technique is primitive but appropriate for his practice: Anything not concerning the Thai-Chinese businessman Samson Lee, no matter how grave and weighty, he forwards to his numerous assistants; anything touching on his master, no matter how trivial, he works on himself. He knows he is Lee’s slave, but so what? It is symbiotic. Lee simply could not survive in the U.S. without a lawyer of McKay’s cunning and ruthlessness, for he is perpetually hounded by all the usual suspects: FBI, CIA, DEA, Inland Revenue. Samson Lee thinks McKay some kind of blue-eyed magus, for Magnus always finds a way out of the apparently watertight traps these agencies lay for his client. Magnus has lost count of the jams he’s gotten Lee and his five sons out of, frequently risking his career. But that is the deal. Roughly thirty percent of the firm’s income comes from the Lee family and nobody, absolutely nobody in the firm, so much as speaks to Lee’s secretary without McKay’s prior knowledge and approval. Samson Lee is the reason McKay got the second corner office.