The Gods of Greenwich (34 page)

WEDNESDAY
,
SEPTEMBER
24
BENTWING AT
$32.86

Inside Café Oliver on Laugavegi, Mr. Ice drained a shot of Reyka. “Get your money out of Hafnarbanki.”

Siggi said nothing. His jaw never dropped. His Siberian-blue eyes, usually in a perpetual state of alarm, never grew wide with surprise or fear. And he did not ask, “Why, cousin?”

Ólafur ordered a second round, even though his cousin was still nursing the first. “I’m in trouble and may lose my job any day.”

Siggi blinked, watching his cousin shatter like glass. “What happened?”

“Nothing worked. Nothing at all.”

“Your plan with Cy?”

“Doesn’t matter, Siggi.”

“Your shares in Hafnarbanki?”

“Sold them yesterday and today.” The stock closed Tuesday afternoon at 580, down another forty-five kronur.

“I’m sorry,” Siggi said.

“Every bank in Iceland is on the verge of collapse. Hafnarbanki can’t keep your money safe anymore.”

The banker drained his second shot in as many minutes. When he ordered a third round, Siggi waved off the bartender, who shrugged her shoulders and returned to the other patrons.

“What’s your problem?” Ólafur snapped. “I just gave you great financial advice. And now you’re cutting me off?”

Siggi had never seen Mr. Ice so vulnerable. “I closed my account at Hafnarbanki last week.”

Ólafur did a double take. “You’re kidding. Why?”

“My dealer friends in London spooked me.”

“What’d they say?”

“The krona is shit, and they won’t take it anymore. Last year, we could buy one euro with eighty-eight kronur. Today, it takes one hundred thirty-nine.”

“What’d you do with your money, Siggi?”

“Wired it someplace safe.”

“Where?”

“Bank of America.”

THURSDAY
,
SEPTEMBER
25
BENTWING AT
$33.67

Rachel Whittier looked at her watch under the streetlight’s amber glow. It was 8:15
P.M.
She crossed Gansevoort Street in the Meatpacking District, the area of New York City sometimes known as “MePa,” and slipped into the evening shadows. Rachel spied Emi Cusack leaving the building with a gaggle of friends, all with boxes in hand.

Septuagenarians were easy targets. They lived solitary lives, ate every night at six
P.M.
never fail, and seldom ran into people. Many of them talked way too loud, their decibels a built-in LoJack for finding the aged. It was far more difficult to monitor Emi Cusack’s moves. She was either working at the Bronx Zoo, meeting her husband, or gabbing with friends.

Plus, she was lucky. And tonight hardly justified the risk. Emi Cusack in public. Emi Cusack accompanied by a throng of women. Emi Cusack in the middle of a baby shower. “How can I hip-check you into traffic,” Rachel cursed from the shadows.

She dialed her employer and said, “I’m staring down the barrel of a dilemma.”

“What is it now?”

“She’s in the middle of a baby shower, Kemosabe.”

“Not my problem,” he said, and clicked off.

FRIDAY
,
SEPTEMBER
26
BENTWING AT
$32.77

Victor brooded at his trading station. There were three new LCD panels, his stash of pharmaceuticals underneath. Noticeably absent was the claw hammer. It was safe, tucked away in a drawer and buried beneath a tangle of gadget cords, jar of moisturizer, and half-empty box of Wheat Thins.

“Damn,” Victor mumbled. “You had your chance, Cy.” The Dow was trading over 11,000 again after yesterday’s brief rally. Thursday had been the perfect time to get safe.

But there would be no going to cash. There would be no taking of losses. There would be only one thing—the swaggering around the Street. “Confidence,” Cy had preached. “We’re on top of the world. You betray fear and somebody will nail-gun your balls to the mat.”

Victor dialed Numb Nuts at Merrill Lynch. “Got any color on the market?”

“Strong opening,” the trader replied. “Congress will probably inject massive amounts of money into financial institutions. I say we rally on expectations.”

“Keep going.” Victor leaned forward in his chair and rolled his head in a big, wide circle, making ready to strut his stuff and exude the confidence that Cy demanded.

“Not much to add. But you should sell and pay off debt ASAP.” With that, the Merrill rep stopped talking and waited for Lee’s reply.

Recognizing his cue and seizing the moment, Victor cowboyed up with all the bravado and bluster he could muster. He grabbed his pills and said, “Let’s do lunch, Numb Nuts.”

Victor had an idea. He doubted his body parts would be nail-gunned to the mat. Unless, of course, Cy found out.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

MONDAY
,
SEPTEMBER
29
BENTWING AT
$28.87

There are plenty of alpha males outside Hedgistan. Emi sipped her bottled water and stared at the grassy slopes of the Baboon Reserve. She regarded
Theropithecus gelada
as a magnificent species, her favorite exhibit at the Bronx Zoo.

Gelada baboons grow two feet tall, give or take a few inches. They weigh anywhere from thirty to forty-five pounds. And their thick, black manes stick out straight. Like defibrillators zapped them. Like electric current is still buzzing through the hair.

Males are especially vibrant. Their chests have bright patches of red skin, shaped like hourglasses and surrounded by snowy tufts of white hair. They look fearsome when roused.

Emi loved to eat lunch here in Somba Village, to sit outside and break from her work with reptiles. It was unseasonably warm for September 29, the perfect day for catching rays.

“Herpetology” comes from the Greek word “
herpeton,
” or creeping animal. The study of reptiles had seemed like such a smart career choice during college. Emi could always distinguish their countless shapes and colors. Through the last few months, however, she had grown tired of snakes and crocodiles. Her head was no longer in the game.

Emi looked at her sketchpad and realized she had drawn Yaz. Fat little cheeks. Wisps of hair. Eyes closed in the happy sleep of newborns. She reminded herself, in that moment, that she would be a mother in two months. The thought made her happy.

She had checked out long ago from her career and her reptiles and her other distractions from Yaz. Almost by instinct, she looked up to see if anyone was looking. There was a blonde, three tables over, peering at her. The woman had green eyes and red fingernails. She looked through Emi, or pretended to look through her, and shifted her eyes to the hilly range on the other side of the patio.

Emi wondered if the woman was staring at her.

*   *   *

Rachel rubbed her right hand, watching Emi Cusack chew a ham-and-Brie on wheat.
Why do people eat that crap,
she wondered,
when the hot dogs smell so good here?

She knew the Bronx Zoo created special challenges. Visitors could turn the corner at any second on the tree-lined grounds and catch her in the middle of an insulin injection. Long-range sniper shots were easier—but disgusting. The notion of a headshot, splattering somebody’s grits against the wall, made Rachel nauseous.

There was an art to contract killing. Rachel fancied herself the Andy Warhol of assassins, a cleaner with a select client base of one who avoided guns and other plebian methodology all too common in her line of work. She had standards.

It was more challenging, better from a career perspective, to disguise executions as natural deaths. Or tragic accidents. There was that decapitation two weeks back, unplanned of course, but the police never suspected foul play. “Poor Barnes lost his head,” Rachel mused to herself.

Of course, the Bronx Zoo offered unique options. No problem to hip-check a pregnant woman into the animals. The question was which cage. Rachel deemed polar bears the most reliable of all predators. Without much encouragement, they would rip Emi to shreds.
Ursus maritimus
stood eight feet tall and weighed over a thousand pounds. They looked so cute, the white fur more eye-catching than the razor claws. Even better, they ate seals.

“Emi Cusack is shaped like a seal,” Rachel smirked under her breath.

The African wild dogs were another option. Known as “painted dogs,” a reference to their mustard and brown-black markings, they hunted in packs. In the wild, the dogs could run at speeds up to forty-one miles per hour for as long as one hour. A pack could easily catch a pregnant woman lumbering through the grassy fields. Emi Cusack, it seemed, was always visiting the dog exhibit.

The chase, one pregnant woman and a bunch of snarling hounds, sounded better than NASCAR. But Rachel decided against the dogs. They made the most annoying sounds. They did not bark. They squealed like pigs. The other problem was size. At best, the dogs weighed sixty pounds each. She needed something big and mean, something like polar bears.

Rachel realized, to her horror, that she had been staring at the mark. Now Emily Cusack was staring back. The pregnant woman stood, crumpled her brown-paper lunch bag into a ball, and walked toward Rachel with the clear intention of making contact.

It’s too soon,
Rachel cursed herself, behind a wide and welcoming smile.

“What a beautiful day,” remarked Emi. She spoke with the patrician accent indigenous to Beacon Hill. Her kind intonation would serve as either a greeting to a friend or a pleasant hello to a stranger. Rachel had no way of knowing. But Emi had worked years to master that inflection. Her tones were the perfect way to mask prosopagnosia and draw out a response.

“You brought a picnic.”

“Sure did,” Emi laughed, radiating the warmth and inner glow unique to women in their third trimester. “I work at the zoo. Do you need help finding an exhibit?”

“The Nile crocodiles.”

“What a coincidence,” said Emi. “I’m heading over there now.”

“May I join you?”

“Of course.”

“Is it true,” asked Rachel, “that their jaws exert more than two thousand pounds of pressure per square inch?”

“You’ve done your homework.”

“That’s me,” Rachel said. “I pride myself on preparation.”

*   *   *

Cusack was battling a different kind of predator. His assailant did not stalk septuagenarians, either asthmatics or grand dames from the Colony Club. It had never orchestrated the spectacular auto crash of a seventy-two-year-old man looking for adventure. His predator was fearsome, nevertheless. It was ruthless. And it was lunging forward, savaging everything in its path.

Fear is the serial killer of money. The House defeated Bush’s $700 billion rescue package, and the Dow crashed 778 points. The world panicked and sold everything possible, no longer caring about losses but only trying to protect whatever was left—somehow, some way. Investors wondered whether any financial institutions remained solvent.

Cusack broke from the action, away from the craze of incoming phone calls, and texted Emi’s cell phone:
I’ll be home late.

He had no inkling about the predator stalking Emi. No clue the battle between Hafnarbanki to the north and LeeWell Capital to the south was sweeping his face-blind wife into the cross fire. The war had turned personal long ago with Shannon’s videotape. Now it was lethal.

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

TUESDAY
,
SEPTEMBER
30
BENTWING AT
$30.64

“Jimmy, I’m freaking out.”

Seven-thirty in the morning was too early for anyone to come unglued, especially Sydney. Cusack’s former assistant was bulletproof on most days, a rock of can-do attitude. Today was different. She was stammering. Sydney sounded like the survivor of a defeated army. Like she was waiting for the victors to mop up whatever remained.

“What’s wrong, Syd?”

“I need help.”

“Can’t you just tell me? The market’s having a nervous breakdown.”

“So am I.”

Cusack’s stomach soured, his thoughts shifting to Jean Bertrand Bouvier and the sublease at the Empire State Building. He said nothing for a minute, and Sydney finally pleaded, “Please.”

“I’m on the way.”

“Good. Because all hell will break loose when people show up for work.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Just get over here,” urged Sydney.

*   *   *

Cusack ignored the view from the sixty-first floor of the Empire State Building. Nothing looks spectacular when a $1.2 million fiasco arrives from nowhere. Jimmy surveyed his old office and glanced where Sydney’s cubicle once stood. He looked inside the conference room, now empty of the oak table, all ten chairs, and even the fifty-two-inch flat-screen television.

There were no phones. There were no computers. Only Mr. Coffee remained, Emi’s purchase from Walmart. Jean Bertrand Bouvier’s shake-and-bake hedge fund shook and booked in the middle of the night.

Sydney stared at Cusack, her brown eyes in shock, her brunette hair mussed, her face showing the toll from the last few hours and more likely the last few weeks. “I have no idea what to do,” she said.

“Let’s start with Jean Bertrand. Did you call him?”

“He doesn’t answer his cell phone.”

“What about the maintenance people, Syd?”

“They say Jean Bertrand sneaked out last night.”

“Somebody saw him.”

“I know, Jimmy. But you know what he’s like. The guy can charm the venom from a rattler.”

“Damn, you sound like him,” said Cusack.

“Sorry.”

“So, nobody’s heard from Bouvier? Are there any numbers to call, anything?”

“No, and we won’t hear from him.” Sydney spoke with absolute conviction.

“Why’s that?”

“He missed payroll last Friday,” she reported.

“You’re kidding. Why didn’t you call me sooner?”

“Jean Bertrand said it was a computer glitch, and he’d square things up this week.”

“You believed him?” asked Cusack.

“He took the office out for a steakhouse dinner and ordered seven-hundred-dollar bottles of wine like money was TP.”