The Last Trade (6 page)

11

Hong Kong

S
he doesn't have to be here, but stepping out of the elevator and into the empty lobby of Hang Seng Bank's legal floor, she realizes that she can't help it. She realizes that her curiosity about the death of Patrick Lau transcends the demands of her job. It's a much-needed diversion, and perhaps because of his age and the dark reality of her own existence, Lau's death has taken on something of a morbid fascination.

After all, she's already done more than her part by stopping by the crime scene on Michaud's behalf. She asked all the right questions and looked at all the pertinent evidence. She's here, she decides, because right now everywhere else is worse.

As soon as Sobieski sees the lawyers, whom she expected, albeit not four of them, as well as Lau's boss Emily Cheng, she knows that Mo was correct, that the interview will reveal nothing of substance. She might not be a homicide detective, but she knows her way around the paranoid halls of a multinational bank well enough to see that no financial institution is about to open up its records simply to find the killer of one of its entirely dispensable employees. If it were money and not a life that was lost, it would be different. But for this, they won't even let them go up to Lau's floor to take a look at his workstation. Instead they're sequestered in an executive conference room and given tea in fine china cups, and repeatedly told that they will receive “the bank's full cooperation” while, repeatedly, their requests are denied.

“Was Lau happy?” Mo asks.

“Patrick was a very happy young man,” answers Cheng.

“Had you noticed anything different in his performance . . . any incident with a coworker or trouble with a client?”

“Not at all.”

Then, Sobieski asks, “Was he having a good year?”

“Excuse me?”

“I know the markets have been inching up, and I was wondering if, you know, performance-wise, he was having a good year.”

Cheng glances at corporate legal suit number two before answering, “I'm afraid that's confidential bank information.”

Mo asks, “Have you ever been to Patrick Lau's apartment?”

Cheng shakes her head. “I heard it was nice. Overlooking the harbor, correct? But Patrick and I did not socialize.”

Sobieski glances at Mo, but he has nothing else to ask. Regardless, she presses on. “What about today? Was there any conversation or transaction or client interaction that involved Patrick Lau, your direct report, that seemed at all unusual?”

Cheng's eyes narrow as she considers Sobieski the inquisitor. Before Cheng can answer, legal suit number three speaks up. “Excuse me, but is this a U.S. government issue, Miss . . . Sobieski? Because as much as we'd like to . . . I don't see why or how . . .”

Sobieski waves off the attorney and stands. No problem. Not my business. Just wanted to let you know that I know you're stonewalling. “Just one last question, Miss Cheng: Do you know of anything that happened today that would have compelled Patrick Lau to want to celebrate tonight, a Monday?”

Rather than look at one of her four attorneys or at Sobieski, Cheng looks down at the conference table as she answers. “No. As I've said, Patrick Lau is one of approximately fifty traders whom I oversee, and I make it a point to have little to no knowledge of any of their personal affairs.”

* * *

As soon as they're back on the street, she mentions Cheng's downward glance. “She knows something.”

“About the murder? Maybe, but if anything, it tells me they made some serious money there today. How they made it, how much, and with whom, that's anyone's guess.”

“I wonder where she made
her
dinner reservations.”

They stand looking back up at the massive glass-and-steel tower of the bank as if it can provide answers.

Finally, Mo says, “This is what I expected from them—a wall. And exactly why I called Michaud, because if we're to find anything, it's going to come back channel. I know it's really not the business of your organization, but if anyone—”

She cuts him off before something is said that could get either of them in trouble, not that Mo seems to care. She decides, when she gets back to her place, she'll do some digging. Another excuse for her to stay home tonight. She tells him, “I understand . . . I'll talk to Michaud, and if he's good with it, I'll see what I can come up with.”

12

New York City

H
e runs across Seventh and flags down a taxi.

“Upper East,” he tells the cabbie. “Ninety-third and York.” Then, after a pause, even though he only visited once, months ago, he sees the number of the building's address in his mind's eye. Cruising east across town on 23rd he redials Weiss. Nothing.

On First, as the cab approaches the NYU Medical Center, Havens turns from the window and looks down. This is where he rushed that night after he got the call about his daughter. Miranda was out for a rare night on the town with her teacher friends. Dinner and drinks. She needed it. She deserved it. He was out on one of many nights on the town with Salvado and clients, all of them already rich but working on more. He had arranged to have the night off, but Salvado said he needed him. Said it was huge. Everything was huge, every week, every day. Every deal. The biggest yet. The most important ever. Of course he went. Though he could take or leave the socializing, in many ways the 24/7 demands of the job fed into his obsession.

“All-consuming,” Miranda called his job. Looking back, he realized the phrase could be applied to the rising importance of materialism in their life and the society in which they lived. All-consumer. All-consuming.

He was supposed to get home by eleven that night to relieve the babysitter, but things were running late—they were moving on to 1Oak for drinks—and this was an important meeting, an important client. The biggest ever that week. The babysitter, a nice enough young woman from Australia, said no problem. She'd cover.

Besides, Erin was sound asleep.

Miranda got the first call. She was walking, on her way home from her night out, two blocks away from the apartment. He was in a nightclub, talking about derivatives and recounting his sub-prime heroics with a man who owned a plastics company, when his phone began to vibrate.

It was an allergic reaction. Until that night they'd had no knowledge that Erin was allergic to anything. Miranda rode in the ambulance with her. Erin was gone long before Havens reached the ER.

Soon after that, he and Miranda were gone, too.

* * *

He doesn't look back up until the taxi rises out of the tunnel past the United Nations tower. Even after midnight there's still a group of people gathered on the sidewalk protesting something somewhere. Traffic slows to look. The cabbie curses at the delay, but Havens looks, too. He sees beauty in their anger, their outrage at human atrocity and greed, and their right to protest it. It is, he decides, the essence of his relationship with the city. It's the essence of his relationship with everything: amazed and conflicted, briefly engaged, transfixed, then detached.

Weiss's building is worse than he remembered. Certainly not the building of a hedge fund guy. The lock on glass door number one has been punched out. In the take-out menu–cluttered lobby he sees Weiss's name Scotch taped on the bank of battered mailboxes. He almost presses the buzzer but sees that it won't be necessary. Someone has left the bolt open against the jamb for door number two, so he simply opens it and heads upstairs.

Near the top of the third flight of stairs he begins to walk softly. He pauses at the half-open door to Weiss's apartment. The common hallway smells of garlic, garbage, and neglect. Human and otherwise. He clenches his fist and raises his hand to knock, but at the last moment he decides not to, though he still keeps his fist clenched.

The door glides open without a creak. Two steps into the hallway, just past a framed print for the Sex Pistols'
Pretty Vacant
, he looks to the right, into Weiss's bedroom. It's empty but disheveled. Dresser drawers open, clothing strewn on the hardwood floor. Books everywhere. On the nightstand, in stacks on the floor, piled high in the open closet. Everything from quantitative theory to video game architecture, Vonnegut to Roth to an analysis of classical Greek literature. On a white Formica desk his PC monitor flashes blue and green and orange and empty.

Havens softly calls his name. “Danny?” Even though he never calls him Danny. Always Weiss. Or Slave. Or Mulder, the guy from
The X-Files
, because for Weiss everything is a conspiracy.

The day he hired him just over a year ago, Havens asked Weiss why in the world a guy with a degree in philosophy and economics, a published poet, social activist, and allegedly recovering hacker, wanted to work for a hedge fund. This was after the fund had made its way to the top of the ratings. Every prior candidate had said something about the opportunity to work with a legend, or The Rising's impressive track record, or a number of other cloaked variations of the real reason: They wanted to get rich beyond belief. They wanted in on the exclusive money party that Rick Salvado, with an assist from Drew Havens, threw the day the rest of the global economy died.

But not Weiss. Weiss said he wanted to work for one of the world's most profitable and best-performing hedge funds because he wanted to understand it. “I want to know if it's love or money that really makes the world go round,” he said. “And why.”

“Weiss? You here, buddy?”

Not much of a kitchen. Cereal boxes on the narrow countertop between the sink and the stove. Cocoa Puffs. Lucky Charms. An unfinished bowl with magically delicious rainbow remnants floating in the milk. Of course he gave Weiss the job on the spot. Havens knew that Weiss would never be as good as he is with numbers, but Weiss would bring something to their work that his was lacking: emotion and empathy and, more than anything, passion. Plus, Danny Weiss was a workplace rarity for Havens: He was genuinely likeable.

The living room, such as it is, is empty. No TV. Speakers with an iPod jack. A garish orange futon. A well-used red and white Cannondale road bike propped against the radiator. Maybe he wanted a different kind of help. Maybe it was a numbers problem. Two more steps. Magazines spread out on a milk crate table.
The New Yorker. Utne. Paris Review
. Who reads these things anymore, besides Weiss?

Maybe he got out, Havens thinks. Maybe he was calling and sent the text from someplace else.

But on the pale white wall above the futon, in between what appears to be an unframed Jules Bettencourt original and a framed photo of Bill Buckner missing Mookie Wilson's grounder in game six of the 1986 World Series, he sees a splatter pattern of still dripping blood.

“Danny,” Havens says, approaching the futon. “Danny Weiss.” A whisper now, and a regret. “Danny.” Not for Weiss, but his own ears.

13

Hong Kong

I
t's not lost on Sobieski that tonight the most important man in her life is dead, stretched out on a cold rack in an HKPD morgue.

Patrick freaking Lau. Her first and in all likelihood—she's a government financial agent, a numbers cruncher after all—her last homicide. Semi-drunk and planning a special dinner one second and facedown and dead on his countertop the next. And not just any countertop. This was gorgeous white Carerra marble in an apartment and a kitchen that put any she's lived in to shame. Not that she covets Lau's place. The truth is the only thing she ever does here in her own modest apartment is work and sleep. Or at least try to. Plus, the last time she attempted to cook a decent meal was more than a year ago. And she botched that even more than she botched the date.

Sobieski knows that she'll probably never live in a place like Patrick Lau's. Not as long as she works this job and lives this life anyway. Since she started at TFI, she's lived in five cities and tried and failed at myriad romances. In that time she's had one serious relationship. With a Brit in Budapest, a filmmaker of all things. She cared enough about him to consider declining her next assignment, a transfer to Zurich. But before she had a chance to explain, the filmmaker, Blake, flat-out refused to consider moving with her, despite the fact that he was in between projects, despite the fact that he'd once said Switzerland was one of his favorite countries. If he hadn't been so adamant about staying, or if he'd at least been in the middle of something profound and great, she might have told him she'd consider turning down her assignment to be with him. But it was clear that making a sacrifice on her behalf never entered his mind. So she dumped him. She'd thought she was in love, but her definition of love was evolving. When you were truly in love, she reasoned, you'd do anything or go anywhere to be together. Despite each other's faults. Because being together, theoretically, made the faults go away. Too bad in practice that was never the case.

She was going to wait until morning but decides to call Michaud now, just after ten o'clock.

“Michaud.” The instrumental prelude to Bon Jovi's “Dead or Alive” in the background indicates that he is still in a karaoke bar.

“My God, Boss,” Sobieski says. “Please tell me that you're not still there.”

Rather than directly replying, Michaud gets right to business. “Anything to that thing?”

“If there is, it's buried in the data. Which the army of lawyers at Hang Seng is not in the least willing to share.”

“So that's that, then.”

Sobieski pauses. Either an animal has been wounded in close proximity to Michaud or someone who should be forbidden from coming within ten feet of a microphone is singing: “
I'm a cowboyyy, on a steel horse I ride . . .”

“Obviously,” Michaud says, “you're thinking there's something else.”

“Well, sort of.” She tells him about the martini on the counter, the restaurant page on Patrick Lau's phone, Lau's recent social and financial history, and about the way that Emily Cheng looked downward after her final question. “The guy absolutely made some money today.”

“Well, those things happen in the financial industry. And even if you're right, and he made it illegally,” Michaud responds, “it sounds like it's Hong Kong's problem. Mo's problem; not TFI's.”

“Agreed. But Mo did ask us to take a closer look. And you wouldn't have sent me if you didn't think . . .”

“Okay, then. Run it. But you've got to promise: This is a murder investigation, big money. Who knows what level of scum. Russian mob scum. In-house bank scum. And it's not a distinctly American thing. If this becomes something more than a numbers case . . . data . . . electronic paper trail . . . anything more than that . . . if it gets dangerous in any way, you pull back.”

“Right.”

“No reason to risk your life over some scumbag's money.”

“Right,” Sobieski answers.

“Want me to make the call?”

“No, I got it.”

“Of course you do, Sobi. Always doing the right thing. Meantime, feel like coming downtown to do a little duet, maybe a little Captain and Tennille with me?”

“Who?”

“Ashford and Simpson?”

“I don't follow.”

“Ike and Tina, with me as Tina?”

“Good night, Michaud.” She hangs up and looks out her window at the closed stalls of Stanley Market. Not the spectacular harbor view that Patrick Lau had, but in the daytime it pulses with tourists and vendors. Sobieski likes the energy and the kinetic vibe of the human interactions happening all around her. Even if, after two years on Hong Kong Island, she doesn't know very many of the humans and a scant few of the interactions involve her.

She decides that in the morning, after she works out, she'll visit the tech center and do a secure and thorough search on any recent activity at Hang Seng Bank. But for now she is content to fix a cup of Chinese chrysanthemum tea purchased yesterday at a market stall not a hundred feet from her front door and use her own laptop to conduct an informal midnight inquiry into the life and times of Patrick Lau.

Always doing the right thing.

Why? Because it's more or less her job, and it keeps her out of trouble. But also because this stranger's death has forced her to contemplate the parallel circumstances of her own life and a world where a single, good-looking, twenty-nine-year-old, allegedly successful financial expert can die alone in a Hong Kong apartment, and no one seems to care.