Limitless (12 page)

Undeterred, I placed an order for an extra 650 shares in US-Cova, at $22 per share. About twenty minutes later there was a blip on the screen and US-Cova started moving. It went up by two points, then by another three points. I watched as the share price just kept climbing upwards. When it reached $36 I typed in a sell order, but still held out for another increase, and only sent in the order when the share price had hit $39, an increase of $17 in little over an hour.

At close of trading on that first day, therefore, I had more than $20,000 in my account. Take away the initial $7,000 and fees, and that meant I had made somewhere in the region of $12,000 profit in a single day. It was small potatoes on the stock market, obviously, but it was still more than I’d often made in half a year as a
freelance
copywriter. This was of course amazing, but it also hit me what an incredible run of luck I’d had: seven picks and seven winners, and on an average day of trading where the market had closed only twelve points up. It was extraordinary. So how had I done it?
Had
it been luck? I tried to go back over the whole thing, to retrace my steps and see if I could identify what signals I’d picked up on, what prompts had led me to these relatively obscure, low-profile stocks in the first place, but it proved an impossibly labyrinthine task. I checked through dozens of trend-lines again, re-ran analysis programmes and at one point found myself crawling across the floor of the apartment over the open pages of broadsheet newspapers and glossy magazines, in search of some article I vaguely remembered
reading and that
may
have suggested something – or sparked off an idea, or led in some other direction, or
not
. I simply didn’t know. Perhaps I’d heard something on TV, an off-the-cuff remark made by any one of a hundred investment analysts. Or come across
something
in a chat-room, or on a message-board, or in a webzine.

Trying to reconfigure my mental co-ordinates at the exact moments I’d chosen those stocks was like trying to stuff toothpaste back into a tube, and I soon gave up. But the one conclusion I could draw from this was that I’d probably used fundamental and
quantitative
analysis in about equal measure, and even though I might not get the proportions exactly the same on the next occasion, and could never recreate the conditions of that particular day, I was certainly on the right track. Unless, of course – intolerable thought – it
had
all been some kind of a fluke, an epic stroke of beginner’s luck. I didn’t believe that it had been, really, but I still needed to know for sure and was therefore anxious to get trading again the next day. Which meant keeping up the preparatory in-take of data, and –
naturally
– of MDT-48.

I got three or four hours’ sleep that night, and when I woke up – which was pretty suddenly, thanks to a car-alarm going off – it took me quite a while to work out where, and indeed
who
, I was. Before the alarm jolted me awake, I’d been in the middle of a particularly vivid dream set in Melissa’s old apartment on Union Street in Brooklyn. Nothing much happened in the dream, really, but it had a guided, virtual-reality feel to it, with tracking shots and detailed close-ups, and even sounds … the evocative whine of the radiators, for example, doors slamming down the hall, kids’ voices rising up from the street below.

The eye of the dream – the POV, the
camera
– glided low along the pitch-pine floorboards, through the different rooms of this railway apartment, taking in everything, the grain of the wood, each swirling line and knot of it … clumps of dust, a copy of
The Nation
, an empty bottle of Grolsch, an ashtray. Then, moving slowly upwards, it took in Melissa’s right foot, which was bare, and her crossed legs, which were bare, and the navy silk slip she was wearing, which
crumpled as she leant forward, half revealing her breasts. Her long shiny black hair was draped on her shoulders and arms, and partially covered her face. She was sitting in a chair, smoking a cigarette, brooding. She looked fabulous. I was sitting on the floor, looking – I imagined – slightly less fabulous. Then, after what might have been a few seconds, I rose up to my feet, and the point-of-view –
dizzyingly
– rose up with me. As I turned, everything turned, and in a kind of hand-held pan of the room I took in the mounted
black-and-white
photographs on the wall, the photographs of old New York that Melissa had always liked so much; I took in the stone
mantelpiece
of the disused fireplace, and above it, the mirror, and
in
the mirror – fleetingly –
me
, wearing that old corduroy jacket I’d had, and looking so thin, so young. Still moving round, I saw the open doors that connected this room to the bedroom at the front, and then, standing framed between the doors I saw Vernon, all hair and smooth skin and in a leather jacket he’d always worn. I got a really good look at him, at his bright green eyes and high cheekbones, and for a couple of seconds he seemed to be talking to me. His lips were moving, though I couldn’t hear anything he was saying …

But then suddenly it was all over, the car-alarm was wailing
plaintively
down on Tenth Street and I was swinging my legs out of bed – taking deep breaths, feeling as though I’d seen a ghost.

Inevitably, the next image to take up residence inside my head was another one of Vernon, but it was a Vernon of ten or eleven years later – a Vernon with hardly any hair, and with facial features that were disfigured and bruised, a Vernon splayed out on the couch of another apartment, in another part of town …

I stared down at the rug on the floor beside my bed, at its
intricate
, endlessly replicating patterns, and shook my head very slowly from side to side. Since I’d starting taking the MDT pills a few weeks before, I had hardly given any real thought to Vernon Gant – even though, by any standards, my behaviour towards him had been appalling. After finding him dead I’d as good as ransacked his bedroom for God’s sake, and then stolen cash and property belonging to him. I hadn’t even gone to his funeral service – convincing myself, on no evidence whatsoever, that that was the way Melissa had wanted it.

I stood up from the edge of the bed and quickly walked into the living-room. I took two pills from the ceramic bowl on the wooden shelf above the computer – which I’d been refilling every day – and swallowed them. It was surely the case, too, that the stuff I’d taken rightly belonged to Vernon’s sister now – and whatever about the drugs, Melissa probably
could
have used that nine grand.

With a knot in my stomach, I reached behind the computers to switch them on. Then I glanced at my watch.

It was 4.58 a.m.

I’d easily be able to give her double that amount now, though – and maybe even a lot more if my second day of trading went well – but wouldn’t that be like paying her off in some way?

All of a sudden I felt sick.

This certainly wasn’t how I’d ever envisaged renewing my
acquaintance
with Melissa. I rushed into the bathroom and slammed the door behind me. I lowered myself to the floor and into position over the rim of the toilet bowl. But nothing happened, I couldn’t throw up. I remained there for about twenty minutes, breathing heavily, holding my cheek against the cold, white porcelain, until eventually the feeling passed – or, rather, feelings … because the weird thing was, when I stood up again to go back into the living-room and start work at my desk, I no longer felt sick – but I no longer felt guilty either.

Trading that day was brisk. I chose myself another little portfolio of stocks to work on, five middle-sized companies plucked from
obscurity
, and more or less cleaned up. Earlier on, over coffee, I’d seen references in several newspaper articles – and later, innumerable references on innumerable websites – to US-Cova and its
extraordinary
performance in the markets the previous day. Digicon and one or two others also got brief mentions, but no coherent picture emerged that could explain what had gone on, or that could link, in any way at all, the various companies concerned. A resounding
Go figure
appeared to be the general consensus of opinion, so even though the odds against someone randomly picking seven straight winners in a row were truly astronomical, it was still possible at that
point, and in the absence of any other evidence, that my initial flush of success
had
just been a question of luck.

It soon became apparent, however, that something else was at work here. Because – just as on the previous day – whenever I came upon an interesting stock, something happened to me, something physical. I felt what I can only describe as an electric charge, usually just below the sternum, a little surge of energy that quickly rippled through my body and then seemed to spill out into the room’s
atmosphere
, sharpening colour definition and sound resolution. I felt as though I were connected to some vast system, wired in, a minute but active fibre, pulsating on a circuit board. The first stock I picked, for instance – let’s call it V – started moving up five minutes after I’d sent off the buy-order. I tracked it, while at the same time nosing around the various websites for other things to buy. With growing confidence, therefore, I found myself surfing stocks throughout the early part of the morning, leap-frogging from one to another, selling V at a profit and immediately sinking all of the proceeds from it into W, which in turn got sold off at just the right moment to finance a foray into X.

But as I grew confident, I also grew impatient. I wanted more chips to play with, more capital, more leverage. By mid-morning I had inched my way up to nearly $35,000, which was fine, but to make a proper dent in the market I’d probably need, as a starting point, at least double – but probably three or four times – that amount.

I phoned Klondike, but they didn’t provide leverage of more than 50 per cent. Not having much of a history with my bank manager, I didn’t feel like trying
him
. Neither did I imagine that anyone I knew would have $75,000 to spare, or that any legitimate loan company would shell out that kind of money over the counter –
so
, since I wanted the money now, and was fairly confident about what I could do with it, there appeared to be only one other course of action left open to me.

I
PUT ON A JACKET
and left the apartment. I walked along Avenue A, past Tompkins Square Park and down towards Third Street to a diner I often used. The guy behind the counter, Nestor, was a local and knew everything that went on in the neighbourhood. He’d been serving coffee and muffins and cheeseburgers and tuna melts here for twenty years, and had observed all of the radical changes that had taken place, the clean-ups, the gentrification, the sneaky
encroachment
of high-rise apartment buildings. People had come and gone, but Nestor remained, a link to the old neighbourhood that even
I
remembered as a kid – Loisaida, the Latino quarter of store-front social clubs, and old men playing dominoes, and salsa and merengue blaring out of every window, and then later the Alphabet City of burned-out buildings and drug pushers and homeless people living in cardboard shelters in Tompkins Square Park. I’d often chatted to Nestor about these changes, and he’d told me stories – a couple of them pretty hair-raising – about various local characters, old-timers, storekeepers, cops, councillors, hookers, dealers, loansharks. But that was the thing about Nestor, he knew everyone – even knew
me
, an anonymous single white male who’d been living on Tenth Street for about five years and worked as some kind of journalist or something. So when I went into his place, sat at the counter and asked if he knew anyone who could advance me some cash, and fast –
extortionate
interest rates no obstacle – he didn’t bat an eyelid, but just brought over a cup of coffee and told me to sit tight for a while.

When he’d served a few customers and cleared two or three tables, he came back to my end of the counter, wiped the area around where
I was sitting and said, ‘Used to be Italians, yeah? Mostly Italians, until … well …’

He paused.

Until what? Until John Gotti took it in the ass and Sammy the Bull went in the Witness Protection Program?
What?
Was I supposed to
guess
? That was another thing about Nestor, he often assumed I knew more than I did. Or maybe he just used to forget who he was talking to.

‘Until
what
?’ I said.

‘Until John Junior took over. It’s a fucking mess these days.’

I was close.

‘And now?’

‘The Russians. From Brighton Beach. They used to work together, them and the Italians, or at least didn’t work
against
each other, but now things are different. John Junior’s crews –
apparently
– couldn’t turn over a cigar stand.’

I never had the measure of Nestor: was he just a fly on the
neighbourhood
wall, or was he connected in some way? I didn’t know. But then, how
would
I know? Who the fuck was
I
?

‘So lately, round here,’ he went on, ‘there’s this guy, Gennady. Comes in most days. He talks like an immigrant, but don’t let that fool you. He’s tough, just as tough as any of his uncles that came out of the Soviet gulags. They think this country is a joke.’

I shrugged my shoulders.

Nestor looked directly at me. ‘These guys are crazy, Eddie. I’m telling you. They’ll cut you around the waist, peel your skin – peel it all the way up to over your head, tie a knot in it and then let you fucking
suffocate
.’

He let that one sink in.

‘I’m not kidding you. That’s what the mujahedin did to some of the Russian soldiers they captured in Afghanistan. Stuff like that gets passed on. People learn.’ He paused, and did a little more wiping. ‘Gennady comes in, Eddie, I’ll talk to him, but just make sure you know what you’re doing.’

Then he stood away from the counter a little, and said, ‘You been working out? You look terrific.’

I half smiled at him, but didn’t say anything. Clearly puzzled, Nestor moved on to another customer.

I sat there for about an hour and drank four cups of coffee. I glanced at a couple of newspapers, and then spent some time trawling through the expanding database I had between my ears, picking out stuff I’d read about the Russian mafia – the Organizatsiya, Brighton Beach, Little-Odessa-by-the-Sea.

I tried not to think too much about what Nestor had told me.

At around lunch-time, the place got busy and I began to consider the possibility that I was wasting my time, but just as I was about to get up and leave, Nestor nodded to me from behind the counter. I looked around discreetly and saw a guy in his mid-twenties coming in the door. He was lean and wiry and wore a brown leather jacket and sunglasses. He went and sat in an empty booth at the back of the diner. I stayed where I was and watched out of the corner of my eye as Nestor brought him down a cup of coffee and chatted for a few moments.

Nestor came back up to the front, collecting some plates on his way. He put the plates on the counter beside me and whispered, ‘I vouched for you, OK, so go and talk to him.’ Then he pointed a finger at me and said, ‘Don’t fuck up on me, Eddie.’

I nodded and swivelled around on my stool. I strolled down to the back. I slipped into the booth opposite Gennady and nodded
hello
.

He’d taken the sunglasses off and left them to one side. He had very striking blue eyes, a carefully maintained stubble and was
alarmingly
thin and chiselled. Heroin? Vanity? Again, what did I know? I waited for him to speak.

But he didn’t. After a ludicrous pause, he made a barely
perceptible
gesture with his head that I took to mean
I
could speak. So I cleared my throat and spoke. ‘I’m looking for a short-term loan of seventy-five thousand dollars.’

Gennady played with his left ear-lobe for a moment and then shook his head
no
.

I waited – waited for him to say something else – but that was obviously it. ‘Why not?’ I said.

He snorted sarcastically. ‘Seventy-five thousand dollars?’ He shook his head again and took a sip from his coffee. He had a very strong Russian accent.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘seventy-five thousand dollars. Is that such a problem?
Jesus
.’

If it came to it, I knew this guy would probably have no qualms about sticking a knife in my heart – and if Nestor was right that’d only be for starters – but I found his attitude irritating and didn’t feel like playing along.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘a
fucking
problem. I don’t see you before. And I don’t
like
you already.’

‘
Like
me? What the fuck has
that
got to do with anything? I’m not asking you out on a date here.’

He flinched,
moved
– was maybe even going to reach for
something
, a knife or a gun – but then he thought the better of it and just looked around, over his shoulder, probably pissed now at Nestor.

I decided to push it.

‘I thought all you Russians were big shots – you know, tough, in control.’

He looked back, widening his eyes at me in disbelief. Then he collected himself, and for some reason made up his mind to respond.

‘What – I
not
in control? I turn you down.’

Now
I
snorted sarcastically.

He paused. Then he snarled, ‘Fuck you. What
you
know about us anyway?’

‘Quite a bit, actually. I know about Marat Balagula and the gas tax scam, and that deal with the Colombo family. Then there’s … Michael …’ I paused and made a show of trying to get the name out. ‘… Shmushkevich?’

I realized from the look on his face that he wasn’t entirely sure what I was talking about. He would probably only have been a kid when the so-called daisy-chain of dummy oil companies had been in full swing in the ’80s, trucking gas in from South America and forging tax receipts. And anyway who knew what these younger guys talked about when they got together – probably not the great scams of a previous generation, that was for sure.

‘So …
what
?’ he said. ‘You a cop?’

‘No.’

When I didn’t add anything, he started to get up to leave.

‘Come
on
, Gennady,’ I said, ‘lighten up, would you?’

He stepped out of the booth and looked down at me, clearly debating in his head whether or not he should kill me right here, or wait until we got outside. I couldn’t believe how reckless I was being, but I somehow felt I was safe, that nothing could touch me.

‘Actually, I’m researching a book on you guys,’ I said. ‘I’m looking for a focus, though – somebody whose point of view I can use to tell the story …’ I held off for a couple of beats, and then went for it. ‘Somebody like you, Gennady.’

He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and I knew I had him.

‘What kind of book?’ he said in a surprisingly small voice.

‘A novel,’ I replied. ‘It’s really just taking shape at the moment, but I see it as a story with an epic dimension to it, triumph over adversity, that kind of thing. From the gulags to the …’ I trailed off here, faltering for a moment, aware that I might be losing him. ‘I mean, if you think about it,’ I went on quickly, ‘the guineas have had it all their own way up to now, but that five-families,
men-of-honour
, badda-bing badda-boom shit has become clichéd. People want something new.’ As he considered what I was saying, I decided to hammer it home, ‘So my agent thinks the movie rights on this will almost certainly be snapped up as well.’

Gennady hesitated for a moment, and then sat back down into the booth, waiting for more.

On the hoof, I managed to outline a vague plot centring on a young second-generation Russian who finds himself moving up through the Organizatsiya. I threw in references to the Sicilians and the Colombians, but with a repeated wave of the hand I also kept deferring, in anticipation, to Gennady’s superior grasp of the details. Managing to flip the axis, I soon had
him
doing most of the talking – albeit in his fairly mangled English. He agreed with some
suggestions
I made and dismissed others, but he’d got the whiff of glamour into his system now and couldn’t be stopped.

I hadn’t planned any of this, of course, and as I was doing it I didn’t really believe I’d get away with it either, but the boldest stroke was yet to come. After he’d agreed to do consultancy on ‘the project’ and we’d established a few ground rules, I managed to edge the conversation back around to the loan. I told him my advance on the book had already been spent and that the 75K was a gambling debt I had to pay off – and had to pay off
today
.

Yeah
,
yeah
,
yeah
.

This matter was now a minor distraction to Gennady. He took out his cellphone and had a quick conversation with someone in Russian. Then, still on the phone, he asked me a series of questions. What was my social security number? Driver’s licence number? What were the names of my landlord and my employer? Where did I bank and what credit cards did I hold? I took out my social security card and driver’s licence, and read out the relevant numbers. Then I gave him the names and the other stuff he wanted while he relayed the
information
in Russian to the person on the other end of the line.

With that taken care of, Gennady put away his phone and got back to talking about the project. Fifteen minutes later his phone rang. As before, he spoke in Russian, at one point covering the mouthpiece with his hand and whispering, ‘That OK, you cleared. So – what? Seventy-five? You sure? You want more? A hundred?’

I paused, and then nodded
yes
.

When he’d finished on the phone, he said, ‘Will be ready in a half-hour.’

Then he put the phone away and placed his hands down flat on the table.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘so who we going to cast in this thing?’

Half an hour later, on the nose, another young guy arrived. Gennady introduced him as Leo. He was skinny and not unlike Gennady, but he didn’t have Gennady’s eyes, didn’t have what Gennady had – looked, in fact, like he’d had whatever it was Gennady did have
surgically
removed. Maybe they were brothers, or cousins, and maybe – I started thinking – maybe I
could
make something out of this. They spoke in Russian for a moment and then Leo pulled a thick brown
envelope out of his jacket pocket, put it on the table, slid out of the booth and left without saying a word. Gennady shoved the envelope in my direction.

‘This a knockdown, OK? Short term. Five repayments, five weeks, twenty-two-five a time. I come by your place each …’ He paused, and stared at the envelope for a moment. ‘… each Friday morning, start two weeks from today.’ He held the envelope up in his left hand. ‘This no joke, Eddie – you take this now … you
mine
.’ I nodded. ‘I go into other stuff?’

I shook my head.

The other stuff being, I presumed – at the very
leas
t – legs, knees, arms, ribs, baseball bats, switchblades, electric cattle-prods maybe.

‘No.’ I shook my head again. ‘It’s OK. I understand.’

I was anxious to get away now that I had the cash, but I could hardly appear to be in too much of a hurry. It turned out, however, that Gennady himself had to go, and was already late for another appointment. We’d exchanged phone numbers, so before he left we agreed that in a week or so we’d make some arrangement to meet again. He’d check up on some stuff, and I’d work a little more on shaping – maybe even expanding – the central character of what had somehow mutated, during the course of our conversation, from a novel into a screenplay.

Gennady put on his Ray-Bans and was ready to go. But he paused, and reached over to shake my hand. He did this silently, solemnly.

Then he got up and left.

I called Klondike from the payphone in the diner. I explained the situation and they gave me the address of a bank on Third Avenue where I could deposit cash that would immediately be credited to my account.

I thanked Nestor for his help and then took a cab to Sixty-first and Third. I opened the envelope in the back of the cab and fingered the wads of hundred-dollar bills. I’d never seen this much cash before in my life and I felt dizzy just looking at it. I felt even dizzier handing it over at the bank and watching the teller count it.