Gods Without Men (21 page)

“How do you even know this? You only met them today.”

“Cy told me.”

“My God, one afternoon and they’re telling you this.”

“You probably never asked. Also—well, Jaz, I realize this is a little out of your comfort zone, but—”

“My comfort zone?”

“You might want to let your guard down a little. They know you belong to me. It’s not like anyone’s going to leap on you and deflower you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You’ve been rigid with panic all day.”

“I have not.”

“Suit yourself. I just want you to have a good time.”

“Hello? I was the one trying to persuade you to come out here. By the way, have you phoned home in the last five minutes? How’s Bianca coping with Raj?”

“You can be a real prick, you know that.”

“You’re the one accusing me of being homophobic.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You implied it.”

“Let’s just drop it, Jaz. And stop raising your voice. They can probably hear us downstairs.”

Two other couples joined them for dinner: a hedge-fund manager and his wife, who were renting the house next door, and another gay couple, a well-known artist and his partner, who had a studio in East Hampton. The food was beautiful—Blue Point oysters, a whole fresh salmon, fine wines that Ellis had collected on various trips to Europe. Everyone except Jaz appeared to be enjoying themselves, particularly Lisa, who was radiating a social energy he hadn’t seen in a long time, holding forth to the table about art and books and music, making everyone laugh. On another day, he would have been proud of his wife, overjoyed to see her so happy. Now he just felt sour. The conversation had little to do with finance, though Fenton occasionally tried to turn things back in that direction. The artist described his latest work, which involved artificially distressing thrift-store paintings and mounting the results in wooden boxes. Cy told the story of an acquaintance who’d been conned by a dealer selling fake Joseph Cornells. There was a lot of talk about travel, trips to Italy, Iceland, the Maldives. Only then did Lisa fall silent. It had been a long time since they’d gone on vacation.

Jaz brooded on what Lisa had said upstairs. Could she be right? Was he a bigot? He had to admit he didn’t really understand the way Bachman lived. There was the age difference. Perhaps it was no different from Fenton and Nadia, but Cy as a trophy husband? Surely he was the wealthier of the two? They certainly weren’t a family, not in the way he thought of one. What was the purpose of all this wealth and culture if not to be passed on? Perhaps that was where Chase fitted in. A surrogate son? He wasn’t sure why he’d taken such a dislike to the boy. It had something to do with his poise, the ease with which he carried his good looks. Chase looked somehow invulnerable, golden, as if the Long Island sun had warmed him right through to the marrow. Watching him languorously pour wine and serve salad, Jaz wanted to scream:
Get a real job! Stop being a parasite!

Despite the evening breeze, the air on the deck felt close and humid. Jaz mopped the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief. When the party left the table for liqueurs, Cy and Lisa slipped off to the study.
Feeling like a spy—or a jealous husband—Jaz followed them, knowing he was making himself ridiculous, yet still irritated by his wife’s look of surprise as he poked his head around the door. He clasped her proprietorially by the waist as Cy showed off yet more treasures, his collection of early printed books of Jewish mysticism. Here was a text of the
Zohar
printed in Antwerp in the 1580s. Here was Isaac Luria’s
Tree of Life
in an eighteenth-century Polish edition.… Cy held the Luria open to a page of diagrams of interconnected circles, like molecules in an organic chemistry textbook. Lisa emitted little oohs and aahs of wonder. It was more than politeness; she seemed moved. Jaz tried to infuse his hug with meaning, hoping to transmit an intimacy he didn’t feel.

“They’re great, aren’t they, darling?” he murmured. She didn’t even nod.

Cy was talking with his usual fevered intensity. “Of course there are so many things I don’t have. I’d love to own a copy of the 1559 Mantua edition of the
Zohar
. I have a bid in at an auction in Moscow next week for an edition printed in Lublin in 1623. I already have printings from all over, Salonika, Smyrna, Leghorn—such evocative place names, don’t you think? A whole diasporic history.”

“It’s a beautiful collection,” purred Lisa.

“Thank you. It’s always nice to show it to someone who can appreciate it. When you talk about Kabbalah now, people just think you mean Madonna and red strings. Even Jews.”

“Terrible.”

“I’ve been trying to persuade your husband that he’s working in this tradition, but I don’t think he believes me.”

Jaz shrugged, cautiously pleased he was being linked to a topic that impressed his wife. From behind, he couldn’t see Lisa’s expression, but it obviously amused Cy, because he arched an eyebrow and grinned. “How much,” he asked her, “has he told you about Walter?”

“Your computer program? A little. He says you’re making the firm a great deal of money.”

“That’s true enough. But I like to think we’re doing more than that. You know we work with data, Lisa. We’re in the business of comparing disparate things, finding links. For a Kabbalist, the world is made of
signs. That’s not some postmodern metaphor—it’s meant literally. The Torah existed before the creation of the world, and all creation emanates from its mystical letters. Of course the modern world is terribly broken. Its perfection has been dispersed. But I like to think that in our small way, by finding connections between all these different kinds of phenomena, Jaz and I and the rest of our team are reading those signs, doing our part to restore what was shattered.”

“What a beautiful way to put it.”

“I’m not sure Jaz thinks so.”

“What? Sure, I think it’s beautiful. I just—well—I prefer to think in more concrete terms.” He trailed off, furious at the look of scorn that flashed across Lisa’s face. Sensing the complicity between them, he was reminded, for the first time since all the crap about circumcising Raj, that his wife was a Jew. This mystical hocus pocus was another thing she had in common with Cy. Absurdly, he felt as if this—this
queer
—was excluding him deliberately, stealing her away.

He was sweating profusely and couldn’t trust himself not to lose his temper, so he muttered an excuse and went back to the main room. At the bar he poured himself a large vodka, brushed off some bonhomous comment from Fenton and went out onto the deck to drink alone. His head was throbbing. The back of his shirt clung heavily to his skin. What was happening? Was he having a panic attack? He asked himself what he was doing there. He had nothing in common with those people—not really, not deep down. What did he have to stand against all their art and culture, all those books and paintings and bottles of Grand Cru Chablis? He was a single generation away from the village, mud bricks and country liquor and honor killings. He was nothing but a jumped-up peasant.

Convinced something terrible was about to happen to him, something abject and physical, he followed the path down to the beach. The moon was almost full and it was easy enough to pick his way. The vodka was gone. He wished he’d thought to bring the bottle. Disgusted, he threw his empty glass out into the darkness, hearing a dull thud as Cy’s expensive crystal hit the sand. Sure, there were the glories of the Khalsa, the Sikh heroes. But what was that to him? India wasn’t his country. He’d been there only once, a family trip when he was fourteen, three
weeks of heat and disorientation and stomach upset. The noise and smell of Amritsar; the homicidal confusion of the roads; the family village, just a few whitewashed huts surrounded by endless green fields. It was another planet. His cousins called him Tom Cruise and tried to teach him cricket. As the family drank sweet tea and ate pakoras in his uncle’s living room, painted a kind of undersea blue-green and decorated with cheap calendars and garlanded pictures of dead relatives, little kids jostled for space in the doorway to stare at his sneakers. He spent most of the vacation in that room, watching Indian movies on an old TV set whose wood-effect case was covered with a lace doily.

No, Baltimore boy, India doesn’t belong to you. He slouched along the beach, trying to name one thing he really owned, one card to play against Cy and Lisa and their Schubert and their old books. Why did a woman like that even want to be with him? What did she see? Nothing, at least not anymore. She’d obviously finally worked out the truth. That’s what it felt like. Palling around with his boss, making little remarks, talking all that intellectual Jew shit.

And there it was. The very bottom. A few drinks and out it came, a little diarrheic trickle of hate. Queers and Jews: He was no better than his uncles. A couple of years of college, a veneer of culture, but still just a boor, a frightened village boy with a chip on his shoulder. And so it went on, as he trudged all the way down to the rocks at the point, turned around.… When he made it back to the house, he pretended he was tired and went to bed. He could hear the others, talking and laughing downstairs. The sound of piano music filtered under the closed door. He wound the sheet about himself like a shroud, praying for sleep. Lisa came to bed very late. In the morning, as they packed to go home, he felt so worthless he could barely look her in the eye.

A few weeks went by. The Walter profits continued to mount. One day he was monitoring the system, doing risk assessments, when he noticed that several figures had deviated from expected values. Certain trades were becoming marginally more profitable. The deviations were tiny, barely noticeable, and he would have discounted them, but they came at the same time as a flurry of news about the currency and bond markets. For a couple of days Walter had been betting heavily against
several small currencies in Asia and Latin America. It had shorted the Honduran lempira, which had now plunged in value, making the firm several tens of millions of dollars. Walter’s position, disguised as it was in thousands of small trades that appeared to come from all over the globe, had led many other investors to think that something substantial was wrong. The Hondurans were now facing a national crisis, as offshore capital fled and creditors started to call in their obligations. As Jaz watched, they suspended trading and went into talks with officials from the International Monetary Fund.

We did that, thought Jaz. We went in there and turned it over, like robbing a bank.

That was the game, he knew. He’d always tried not to think too hard about that side of things. What was it Bachman had jokingly called himself at that dinner, replying to yet another sycophantic question of Lisa’s? A
haruspex
. The priest who read the sacred entrails for the emperor. The emperor being Fenton Willis, who’d turned his thumb down with a regal flourish.
The slave must die
. The traders were celebrating their big win. Jaz went with them. There were jokes about quants and pointy heads. They wanted to get him drunk and he let them. He called Lisa from a club on the Lower East Side, not realizing it was already one in the morning. The next thing he knew, he was waking up in a Midtown hotel room, mercifully alone. He headed straight back to the office to check the newswires.

Throughout the next day the lempira carried on sliding. The Honduran government looked shaky. People were on the street in Tegucigalpa. Jaz chugged coffee and looked over Walter’s advice to the trading desk. The lempira didn’t figure. It had turned its attention to another asset class, another region. Everything was now U.S. mortgage-backed securities. He was relieved. At least Walter wasn’t telling them to twist the knife.

In the following days Walter built up a huge holding of Australian mining stock, and made some obscure bets in the West African government bond market. Bachman ordered the team to plug in figures on financial institutions in the region, and Jaz’s screens were filled with the activities of the Banque de Développement du Mali, Banque Internationale
pour l’Afrique Occidentale, the Bank of Africa, Banque Sénégalo-Tunisienne, Compagnie Bancaire de l’Afrique Occidentale, Ecobank.… He wouldn’t have noticed anything out of the ordinary, had he not opened the wrong file on his desktop and found himself looking at a graphic illustrating the performance of the Bourse Régionale in Abidjan. The pattern of rise and fall looked familiar. He compared it to a graph of the value of the lempira during the crash and found it tracked almost exactly. That was a coincidence, of course. There was no reason for those two things to be linked. But there also seemed to be no reason why stocks on the Abidjan Bourse should fall so catastrophically just at that moment. There had been no major announcement, no rumor of war. Unlike the lempira, recovery was quick. Three days later trading was at its old level.

He was developing a strange rash on his eyelids. Lisa was barely speaking to him. Though he was exhausted, he was having trouble sleeping: All night Walter’s scatter-pattern visualizations pulsed behind his closed eyes like a swarm of malign insects. He spent several nights in front of the computer in his office upstairs at home, eating chips and salsa by the light of a desk lamp and running comparisons between time-series data on the performance of the lempira and every African variable he could think of—exchange rates, balance of payments, international liquidity, interest rates, prices, production, international transactions, government accounts, national accounts, population. When he was done with Africa, he moved on to East Asian countries.

He found it in Thai banking stocks. The same sudden crash. The same period of time. He couldn’t help asking himself:
Had they done this?
It seemed contrary to reason, one of those ideas, like quantum superposition, that defied common sense. Was Walter having some kind of echo effect? Or was this something else, one of Cy Bachman’s sparks, a trace of divine intellect? Jaz’s neck was spasming. He riffled through the bathroom cabinet, looking for something to help him sleep.