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Which is where Smith Calhoun was president. Smith was an old Yale classmate of Timothy, a great guy – not to mention an early investor in Timothy's hedge fund. And so one thing led to another, and one day over drinks in the Four Seasons, Smith said: You ought to meet this Jewish kid; he's graduating Stanford – I'd want him myself, but with the way things are going here at Salomon, it wouldn't be right. Soon enough Timothy had his second full-time employee.

The Kid did all the leg work. He called himself the ‘Quant', while Timothy was the ‘Face' – the man who raised the money and presented himself to investors, family offices, wealthy people. Timothy would come up with an idea – like, for instance, shorting the Japanese yen – and then the Kid would figure out how to do it, what quantity to short, which brokers to call, where to set the limit price, how much margin would be required. It was a good division of labor, Timothy often thought, because it allowed each
person to do what he was good at: the Kid dealt with numbers, Timothy with human beings.

Timothy looked up at the Kid, to see if his words about not fighting the tape had soothed him. The Kid seemed even more pale, and Timothy noticed he was trembling.

‘How much did we lose?' Timothy asked.

‘Twenty-four.'

‘Thousand?'

‘Million,' the Kid said. And then, to be clear: ‘Dollars. Not yen.'

‘I see,' Timothy said. He felt light-headed. The room closed on him like a drawstring sack.

The Osiris Fund II, the fund Timothy managed and which employed the Kid, had started the year with around a hundred million dollars. Which meant that between the time Timothy went out to dinner the preceding night, and the time he opened his coffee lid this morning, the fund had lost a quarter of its value. Which further meant, for example, that Pinky Dewer, the earliest and largest investor in Osiris, had lost nearly eight million dollars while Timothy was eating tuna tartar and soft shell crabs at Tamarine. And which meant that Timothy himself, who had invested five million of his Van Bender dollars in the fund, had lost over a million dollars before dessert.

‘Twenty-four million?' Timothy said again.

‘You wanted to make a big bet,' the Kid said, suddenly defensive. ‘You said, “Make a big bet.” Right?' He stopped, pulled back. More gingerly now: ‘Didn't you say that?'

Timothy nodded. ‘I did.'

The Kid stared at him, waiting for some kind of instruction, some kind of order. In his life, Timothy had seen that look a thousand times before.

For as long as Timothy could remember, people looked to him as a leader. Some of this came from his deportment – thanks to Father's constant needling, Timothy carried himself rigidly, never slouched, never crumpled under stress. Some of it came from genetic luck: Timothy had been born handsome, with a pleasant face and an easy smile, and people gravitated to men like that.

But part of it came from effort. Long ago, Timothy had decided that you could go farther in the world by being willing to say something, even if you were unsure about whether or not your words were right. It is the secret that all successful people eventually learn, but seldom want to share: the mere act of making a decision, of speaking, of taking a chance, is enough. Most people are frozen by fear of failure, but men like Timothy understand that failure, when it comes, is never a permanent state – you can always try again, after all.

When had he first realized this? Maybe he had always known it vaguely, subconsciously. But it had crystallized thirty years earlier, at Exeter. One night, Headmaster Tillinghast – with his buttery jowls, owl glasses and tiny slits for eyes – marched imperiously into the freshman dorm. He announced that everyone in the dorm would be punished equally, and severely, for a horrendous crime. Mickey the janitor, while doing electrical work in the dorm's common room, had discovered an ounce of pot in the space above the drop-ceiling. Only by coming forward and admitting guilt could the culprit save his classmates from what would surely be a life-altering punishment.

That night, hours before Tillinghast was to mete out his sentence, the boys debated. Some wanted to turn in the actual pot-smoking culprit – the sad-faced, gangly Martin Adams – rather than face expulsion. Some boys cried, terrified of wrecked academic careers, parental disappointment, family shame. Expulsion was no idle threat: Tillinghast had done it to poor Chaz Dominick just a month earlier, for showing up to Latin with alcohol on his breath. Other boys – the minority – wanted to fight, to resign from the school en masse, to protest at the barbarous collective punishment.

Then the debate stopped and they turned to Timothy who, even at fifteen, always seemed to have an answer, and who understood the value of presenting it with confidence. ‘I'll tell you what we need to do,' he said, without knowing the words that would follow. ‘What we need to do is this.' And then, magically, the words were there, and he explained it all clearly and forcefully: they would send a group of three boys into Tillinghast's dark,
oak-paneled office the next morning, and they would stand at attention, with their blue blazers and regimental ties, and they would admit, ruefully, that yes, they knew who had placed pot in the ceiling, and they regretted that they had to report such a thing about a former classmate, but their duty to the school required it, and so, they were turning in … Chaz Dominick, who had hidden the pot some months earlier.

It hardly mattered that the plan was little more than a hastily concocted scheme, or that it was neither honorable nor true, or that it pinned a crime on an innocent boy who was not present to defend himself – but, rather, what mattered was that it was a plan, a course of action, and Timothy had proposed it with great confidence and vigor.

Yes, Timothy had seen the look of the Kid many times before – that look of helplessness, of longing to know an answer, any answer. Timothy's life had been a living proof that confidence alone is the answer. Ninety percent of all doubts can be soothed by self-assurance. A solid handshake and a nice suit take care of the other ten.

This was how it had been at Yale, too, where Timothy never worked more than an hour at night – not when there were so many other pleasant distractions: cocktails, parties, time well spent with friends. But Timothy did not fail, or even do poorly; his special talent, as he came to understand it, was the ability to do well by doing the absolute minimum required.

Like all talents, this too required a fine judgment, an aesthetic sense, like that of a painter who knows to use the smallest dab of watercolor to great effect. Sometimes Timothy received good grades in a course by being a vocal participant in the classroom, raising his hand often, drawing tenuous links between Hamlet and, say, Thomas Jefferson – all without having read a page of the course work. In another class, the opposite approach was required: a Tantric stillness, a blending into the background and hardly breathing. In other classes, a well-timed bottle of Macallan twelve given to a Latin professor did the trick, or the purchase of dinner at Mory's. The success Timothy continuously enjoyed – first at Exeter, then at Yale, then in New York, and finally at
the helm of Osiris – was not the result of tricking people, or of buying them off. His success came from giving them exactly what they wanted: answers.

And so the Kid, having just witnessed Timothy lose twenty-four million dollars, and worried perhaps about his own young career, about the lead-lined suit he would be forced to wear as a reputation, stood there sweating, the circles under his armpits spreading, his dark complexion strangely sallow, his knees bent, weak, and near collapse. He too wanted an answer from Timothy.

Timothy calmly sipped his coffee. He took great care to keep his hand steady. He put down the cup, recapped it, and then refolded the wax paper over the uneaten half of his bagel.

‘I have a plan,' Timothy said, as he waited for it to arrive. ‘Here's what we are going to do.'

And then he laid out the plan for the Kid, who lapped it up eagerly, like a bulldog at a rain puddle, and agreed that it was a good plan, and was thankful to be given a task – any task – by a man who could still smile after losing twenty-four million dollars.

2

The plan, if one could call it that, was simply this: double up the bet and try again.

The yen had briefly risen to seventy-five – that is, one dollar could buy seventy-five of them – but this was an unsustainable price, Timothy explained. The yen, after all, had been falling for over three years. It had plummeted from a hundred and fifteen, down through the psychological barrier of a hundred, and then on down through ninety, through eighty, through seventy, without pause.

Everyone agreed the yen would continue to fall until it reached fifty, its natural level. That's why Osiris had shorted the yen at sixty-nine; that is, it had bet that it would fall even lower than sixty-nine. Osiris sold three thousand futures contracts on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Which meant that when the yen fell to fifty, Osiris would make a profit of seventy-one million dollars.

But the original wager had not exactly worked out. Almost the day after Osiris placed the trade, the yen had jumped back to seventy-five. Still, Timothy had explained to the Kid, this was not something to fear. This was typical, and moments like these separated men from boys. Indeed, this was a profit opportunity. So while everyone else was running for the exits, liquidating positions, calling in collateral, Osiris would be able to take advantage of the irrational market. It would double its bet, gambling now with six thousand contracts instead of three thousand, and would be able to make back all its losses, and then some.

So these were the instructions Timothy gave to the Kid. He ticked them off quietly and quickly, like a general to his adjutant under the hail of cannon. First, liquidate all stock positions in
order to free up margin. Next, get Refco, Bear Stearns, Barclays, Citigroup on the line. Split the trade across four brokers. No front running.

‘And one more thing,' Timothy added.

Jay had already turned to leave. He stopped at the door, his hand perched on the knob. He was eager to get moving, to place the trade, to start making money again.

‘We can't alarm our investors,' Timothy said.

The Kid removed his hand from the door. ‘Okay,' he said. But he frowned.

‘We don't want to tell them about this setback,' Timothy explained, ‘not yet. We need to recoup the losses first. When the yen falls back down and we've broken even, then we'll tip our hand.'

‘But Timothy,' the Kid said, ‘we need to report our results. We send August statements to investors in two weeks.'

‘Yes,' Timothy said. ‘But two weeks is a long time. Practically forever. You know what can happen in two weeks? Anything. So we'll report then. No use alarming people about details.'

‘Okay,' said Jay.

‘The thing is,' Timothy continued, ‘if our investors find out that Osiris lost twenty-four million dollars, some of them might get antsy. They might pull their money out. And if they pull their money out, then we won't have enough cash to sell six thousand contracts. You see what I'm saying?'

‘I think I do,' Jay said.

‘What I'm saying,' Timothy continued, ‘is that we won't be able to make back the money for the other investors. So, really, it's a question of fairness.'

The Kid said, ‘I see.'

‘Fairness for all the other investors,' Timothy said again. This was an important point.

‘Okay,' Jay said.

‘So let's not talk to our investors now. No phone calls. No meetings. Just …' He brushed a finger to his lips and let it float away, like ragweed. ‘Quiet.'

‘Okay, Timothy.'

Timothy smiled and winked. ‘See now,' Timothy said, ‘this is a great learning experience. Now you'll see how the world really works.'

The Kid nodded. He left the room – in too much of a hurry, Timothy thought – and got to work.

3

When he finished the remaining half-bagel, Timothy shuffled from his office to the reception area. At work for less than thirty minutes, he had already had a long day.

Osiris was on the twenty-third floor of the Bank of America building, the only tall building in Palo Alto. On a clear day like this one, when everyone else in San Mateo County was twenty floors below him, Timothy could observe his entire world without moving. He could see his own house, ten blocks north: an old Tudor surrounded by ornamental grasses and apricot trees. To the east he could see the Stanford campus, its red Spanish roofs and sun-colored brick, where hundreds of computer scientists scurried into classrooms and wrote the software he used to make money. To the south he could see Sand Hill Road, with its lawyers and venture capitalists and sloshing pools of cash, where investors sat in low-slung office buildings, sipping lattes and smiling at Timothy's perfect money-raising pitches. He could see as far as the San Mateo Bridge and SFO, his portal to Manhattan, where a first-class ticket set him back eight hundred dollars but bought him as much decent cabernet as he could drink in five hours and dropped him thirty minutes from the Four Seasons.

He leaned against the wall of windows, his breath fogging his view of the Bay. Further out, the San Mateo Bridge, an ugly barrel of concrete, was shrouded in its own Bay fog.

‘It's a beautiful day,' said Tricia Fountain. Tricia was Osiris' receptionist. She sat at the reception desk, in front of a wall that said in simple brass letters ‘Osiris LP'.

Timothy had hired Tricia six months ago, after interviewing a handful of other candidates. Those candidates included a middle-aged black woman with two kids, a Chinese man from Stanford
who Timothy suspected was gay, and two fat women whose resumes Timothy failed to read.

No other candidate had Tricia's qualifications. First, she was twenty-three. Second, she had bright blue eyes, dark hair, clear skin, and chiseled cheeks. Third, she dressed well. Today it was navy blazer over cashmere sweater, tight and blue, which displayed her body in a thoughtful, understated way. The way Tiffany's displays engagement rings, Timothy had thought the first time he looked at her breasts. No point being gaudy about them. They speak for themselves.