Graveland

In early 2001, having saddled the pharmaceutical giant with huge debt and cut its workforce by a third, Vaughan’s Oberon Capital Group sold Eiben-Chemcorp for a profit of $457 million. It appears, however, that Oberon did this in the full knowledge that an R &D scandal involving leaked samples of a trial “smart drug” was brewing at Eiben. What is more-and is perhaps more shocking-they then shorted the buyer’s stock in order to make a double killing on the transaction.

– House of Vaughan (p. 23)

1

JEFF GALE LEAVES HIS BUILDING AT 8:15 A.M. It’s a Saturday morning, and Seventy-fourth Street is quiet. A taxi glides by. Across the street an old lady stands with her poodle waiting for it to take a dump.

The sun is shining, but it’s still a little chilly.

Jeff Gale limbers up. He puts in his earbuds, taps on his iPod, and takes off for Central Park, which is three blocks away. As usual, by the time he gets to Madison Avenue he has pretty much clicked into gear, running in sync with the music and staying ahead of his anxieties, none of which will make it with him as far as Fifth, let alone the entrance to the park at Seventy-second Street.

He’ll gather them up again on his way back.

One by one.

This renovation kick Felicia’s on, for instance. How unnecessary it is, and how he’s had to pass his resentment off as indifference. Simply because he hasn’t got the time or the energy to deal with it.

Or her.

Which is nothing, of course, in comparison with the next anxiety-being at the helm of Northwood Leffingwell. What a bizarre, unending fever dream that’s turned out to be, his shift from the number two position at the New York Fed not exactly proving to be the best-timed career move in Wall Street history.

What with all this supposedly long-overdue reform looming.

De-reg, re-reg.

It’s a joke.

But as for the next anxiety, don’t even go there.

He swallows.

The girls, what else? Is he spoiling them, screwing up their chances of having a normal childhood? Is Felicia? Will the girls ever have the motivation to accomplish anything in their lives, given that they’re incredibly, obscenely wealthy? They’re not out of place at Brearley, that goes without saying, but they are a bit (a lot) when they visit North Carolina, where Jeff’s originally from, and where they must seem pretty exotic to their subprime cousins.

Mean little Manhattan rich girl bitches.

It’s with the angled lens of Fifth Avenue widening just ahead of him that Jeff remembers he didn’t take his pill before coming out. It’s still sitting on the shelf of the medicine cabinet in his bathroom.

Damn.

Felicia distracted him with a catalog of marble samples for the vestibule.

Verde guatemala or nero marquina.

But what’s he supposed to do now?

The music alone’s not going to cut it. This weird, minimalist European jazz a guy at the office turned him on to isn’t working at all this morning. Without the medication, it’s just too much, too jangly, too grating.

Crossing Fifth, he tugs at his earbuds, pulls them out.

Without the medication, in fact, running itself is too much. He only does it to get out of the house. That’s because work, as excuses go, tends not to fly this early on a Saturday morning, not in normal circumstances anyway, whereas a run in the park does.

Plus, he has a gym at home that he never uses, so this is actually good for him. He just doesn’t enjoy it. That’s why before leaving the house he usually takes an anti-anxiety pill, which he then washes down with a counterintuitive triple espresso.

His secret formula.

Other guys he knows in their forties love running, and tennis, and lifting weights.

Jeff would prefer to be working.

Jeff would always prefer to be working.

But on he trots-two blocks south, then into the park, and around to the left-lumbered now with all of this unfiltered crap in his head.

As he passes the playground-which is already pretty busy, despite the hour-he imagines having Elena and Jordan at his heels, imagines them still being small enough to head in there for a quick turn on the climbing pyramid or the swings.

Ellie and Jojo.

His precious girls.

When did they get to be so big?

At a steady pace, he makes his way along East Drive, down through the Dene. Other runners flit past. Sunlight flickers through the trees to his right and reflects against high apartment-building windows to his left.

Verde guatemala or nero marquina.

It’s insane.

There’s also been talk of gold fittings for the main bathroom. She’s going to ruin the place. Make it look like the Donald Trump-inspired fuckpad of some low-rent Saudi sheik. Which he can’t allow. If only on the grounds of taste. Though actually, in these days of the deferred stock option, the twelve million dollars Felicia has penciled in for the job may well end up being needed elsewhere.

The cash bonus no longer a given.

Heading sharply downhill now, he builds a little momentum.

New structures.

For a new paradigm.

At which point he glances up and sees them. Two runners, twenty yards away and closing in.

In front of him, though.

Directly in his path.

Jeff’s not an expert or anything, but he knows there’s an etiquette here, something about-what is it?-following the counterclockwise flow of…

“Hey,” he says, almost before he thinks it, New York indignant.

But nothing.

No reaction.

He glances around, not all the way… enough, however, to realize that they’re down in a little hollow here-granite apartment buildings high to his left, okay, but very high, and not much now to his right either, just a steep clay mound leading up to some patchy dry grass.

The two runners are very close. He swerves to avoid them. They swerve, too.

And meet him head-on.

“HEY.”

The collision, the distribution of force, is uneven-they’re prepared, Jeff isn’t. He falls and hits the path, sideways, hurting his arm. He immediately swings around and looks up, trying to focus, somehow imagining that what he’ll be seeing is faces.

Recognizable, explicable.

But all he sees instead-barely recognizable, and far, far from explicable-is an extended arm, a gloved hand, and the gray barrel of a gun.

The delivery arrives. It comes in two pallets, fifty cartons to a pallet, two units to a carton. That’s two hundred new LudeX consoles, three-quarters of which are on pre-order, meaning they’ll have fifty units on display.

Fifty.

These will sell out within minutes, literally, which in turn means the rest of the day is going to be a living nightmare-apologizing, explaining, the two things you’re never supposed to do. But whoever said that clearly never worked in retail, because it’ll be “I’m sorry, we’re sold out,” followed by “We only got fifty units in,” all fucking day.

Frank Bishop signs for the delivery and starts hauling the cartons from the receiving area into the already overloaded stockroom. As the manager, he gets to do this-come into work early on a Saturday, before eight, and strain his back in such a way that he’ll be in pain for the rest of his shift, and probably for a lot longer than that. The two young salesguys will be in at nine, but that’s too late, the stuff has to be ready to go when the doors open-and since he was recently instructed to cut twenty hours a week from payroll there’s no one else here to do it.

It’s his responsibility.

In the loosest possible sense of the word, of course.

Because Frank Bishop knows what responsibility means, he’s had plenty of it in his day, and doing this job? Getting LudeX consoles onto the shelves of a PalEx store in a suburban mall in upstate New York in time for a 9 A.M. onslaught by an army of pimply geeks? That barely qualifies.

But Frank is happy to have the job. There’s no question about that. At forty-eight, and in the current climate, he could just as easily have landed on the scrap heap. There are days when this certainly feels like the scrap heap, but most of the time he just gets on with it.

He has bills to pay.

It’s as simple as that, his life reduced to a monthly sequence of electronic bank transfers.

College fees, allowances, rent, utilities, car, food.

Fuck.

Close his eyes for a second and Frank can be right back before any of this got started, twenty-five, thirty years ago-a different world, and one in which this degree of a financial straitjacket was something he only ever associated with his parents, with that whole generation.

It wasn’t going to happen to him, though. Not a chance.

But then who paid for him to go to college? Exactly. And arrogant little prick that he was, he took every bit of it for granted, never once imagining, for example, that his old man might have had other things he could be doing besides working his ass off holding down two jobs he more or less hated.

One of which, ironically, was not unlike this one.

Frank exhales loudly, no one around to hear him, and reaches down for another carton.

He carries it into the stockroom and adds it to the pile by the main door.

Back then, as well, it was all about possibilities opening up-relationships, career moves, the world. Now it’s the opposite, possibilities are closing down all around him. The world? Forget about it. Career moves? He’s lucky to have this job, and there aren’t any others out there waiting for him. As for relationships, well… unless it’s paid for or virtual, that ship’s sailed.

Frank exhales again, even louder this time.

Is there anything less attractive than self-pity?

Not really, but at least he knows how to bitch-slap it back into place whenever it gets out of hand. Because the truth is he doesn’t really feel sorry for himself at all. He has two kids that he adores, and even though they’re both off at college now, he is completely and utterly defined by them. The world of twenty-five years ago, for all its breathless sense of expectation, of the open road ahead, didn’t have them in it. This one does, and that’s all that matters. This one, for all its oppressive sense of disappointment, of the economic jackboot in the face, is infinitely superior.

When he has carried in the last carton, Frank rips one open. This will be his first look at the new, long-awaited LudeX upgrade.

Like he gives a crap.

He takes a unit box out and turns it over. The sight of the Paloma Electronics logo, the powder blue stripe, sets off a tiny ripple of anxiety in his brain.

Paging Dr. Pavlov.

But what does he expect? This is a Paloma store, after all. The logo is everywhere. Damn thing is even sewn into the collar of his shirt.

It’s just that he associates it with…

He was going to say defeat, but that’d be overstating things.

He puts the unit down.

Wouldn’t it?

Maybe, whatever, yes, no.

Self-pity snapping at his heels again, Frank decides to hit the accelerator. He gets on with unpacking the units and stacking them on shelves. He makes coffee and takes a couple of Excedrin for his back.

Just before nine Lance and Greg show up.

They’re nice guys, friendly, reliable, and a lot more savvy about all the tech stuff here than he is, but at the same time there’s something about them that he doesn’t get. It’s a sort of dumb, uninquiring compliance, a lack of…

He doesn’t know, but when he was their age-

Yeah, yeah.

Walking across the main floor, Lance says, “Yo, Mr. B.”

Greg points at the LudeX display and says, “Alright, let’s do this.”

The launch of Paloma’s LudeX upgrade today is a big deal. But for the real action you’d have to go to their flagship store in Times Square. That’s where the hardcore gamers will have been standing in line all night, where the cash registers and card machines will be humming steadily all day, and where staff members will be under intense pressure to exceed sales quotas and push service extras.

Up here at Winterbrook Mall it’ll be a more sedate affair, and considerably shorter. Outside in the main gallery there isn’t a line exactly, though clusters of certain usual suspects are beginning to hover. When they open the doors at nine, there’ll be a rush to get in, followed by an intense flurry of activity, but by ten o’clock it’ll all be over-thanks to that jackass at corporate who saw fit to only send him a lousy fifty units on top of the pre-orders.

What kind of a sales strategy is that supposed to be?

Frank doesn’t care, though.

By midmorning he’s on autopilot, daydreaming again-about his previous life, about Lizzie and John, about… whatever really, that Asian woman who works at the Walgreens on the lower level, the four-cheese pizza at Mario’s, local cancer services even, not that he needs them or anything, but you never know.

Just after midday his attention is diverted by something he sees on TV-sees on multiple plasma screens lining the back wall of the store. It’s a Fox News report.

He stands staring at it, reading the crawl.

Happy to be distracted.

In Central Park, a jogger has been shot dead.

In cold blood.

What gives the story a little twist, though, Frank soon sees, an extra kick-what will allow perfect strangers to make eye contact with one another throughout the day and express disbelief, shock, or even a hint of schadenfreude-is that the victim has been identified as the CEO of a big investment bank down on Wall Street.

“Holy shit.”

Ellen Dorsey glances from the small TV screen behind the counter to the old guy sitting next to her. She shakes her head. The old guy nods in acknowledgment. Picking up his coffee cup, he says, “Too good for the bastard.”

Ellen makes a snorting sound. She then finishes her own coffee, pays, and leaves. Out on the street-Columbus at Ninety-third-she is conflicted. The plan had been to go home and get back to work, but now she’s thinking… crime scene. It’s only twenty-five blocks away and across the park, a short cab ride. By this time, of course-what is it, almost one-the whole area will be cordoned off and there won’t be anything to see, she knows that, but her instinct tells her this is going to be a big story, and nothing beats firsthand experience of a crime scene.

Besides, it’ll be in the bank. If necessary. For later.

I was there.

You can also pick up on stuff walking around, details, vibes.

But as she throws her arm out to stop a cab, Ellen remembers just how much work there is waiting for her at home, and how soon it’s due. A five-thousand-word profile of no-hoper GOP hopeful Ratt Atkinson. To be extracted from a mountain of notes, interviews, and archive material spread out all over her desk.

For Monday morning.

The cab pulls up. She hesitates, but gets in.

You always get in.

Anyway, Ratt Atkinson? That kills her every time she hears it, or has to write it, which today and tomorrow will be plenty.

The article is one of an informal series she’s doing for Parallax magazine on the degraded nature of the modern presidential bid. It started with a bang, that piece she wrote with Jimmy Gilroy a while back on the John Rundle fiasco. Since then she’s covered a couple of other crash-and-burn candidates… but really, at this stage, is the idea wearing a little thin?

She’s just not sure.

The cab turns left at Ninetieth and heads for the park.

The point is, Ratt Atkinson, rock-solid middle-aged white-guy former governor of Ohio, hasn’t crashed or burned yet, and Ellen figures he won’t have to bother. His name will do it for him. Sooner or later. It’ll have to.

Campaigns have stumbled on less.

But is there a story in it?

The cab cruises through the park, comes out at Seventy-ninth, and heads down Fifth. Ellen gets out at Sixty-eighth.

As expected, the crime scene is a disappointment, yellow tape and surly cops blocking access at every approach. But also as expected, there is a mild carnival atmosphere on the periphery, as joggers, passersby, and tourists congregate in small improvised groups to stare and make comments-and more often than not out loud, some of them cranky, others smart-alecky, little vocal tweets posted on the thickening early afternoon air. There are a couple of OBU trucks lined along Fifth, and one camera crew can be seen wandering aimlessly around, looking-Ellen supposes-for a decent vantage point.

They’re too late, of course.

Ellen wanders aimlessly herself for a bit. She takes out her phone and does a quick check. A lot of actual tweets are being posted about Jeff Gale. This isn’t surprising, though. A murder in Central Park would be pretty unusual in itself these days, but add in a high-profile victim and you’ve got yourself an instant trend. Ellen thinks about it. The only information out there is that Gale was jogging, and that he was shot.

She looks around.

But why would anyone shoot a jogger? Not for their iPod. Not even for their wallet. Not in Central Park. Not these days.

Not shoot them.

So who did do it, and why?

Unless there’s a quick explanation forthcoming, this is a story that’s going to burn up a serious amount of media space in the next few days. There’ll be intense speculation about it, because Northwood Leffingwell is a Wall Street behemoth, one of the Too Big to Fail brigade. But even if it turns out that where Jeff Gale worked had nothing to do with why he got killed, it’s inevitable that where he worked will form a significant part of the narrative.

Anyway.

It already has.

Ellen checks the time on her phone.

Ratt fucking Atkinson.

It just annoys her that this feels like a real story, and that she’s right here, where it happened, but that for all she can do about it she might as well be one of those French tourists over there. Ellen’s not a beat reporter, and hasn’t been for many years. What she specializes in these days is longer, slow-burn investigative pieces, and mainly for Parallax. She’s also quite well known, and has a bit of a reputation, built up over years, as a polemical, potty-mouthed, uncooperative bitch. So even if she wanted to report on this, it’s unlikely that anyone-cop, city official, fellow hack-would talk to her.

But anyway, report on what? The story’s over. She’s wasting her time. Even that camera crew there seem resigned to it and are setting up a generic shot now-East Drive in the background, steady stream of joggers, fine, but not one of them laid out dead on the asphalt.

Ellen looks at her phone again. She could make it over to Central Park West, pick up a cab, and be home in fifteen, twenty minutes.

She glances around one last time, then starts walking. But at about the five-yard point someone calls out, “Hey, wait up.”

She turns back.

“Ellen?”

A guy is walking toward her, early thirties, overcoat, shades, mop of curly hair. Could be anyone. She’s actually pretty bad on people-faces, names-unless it’s someone directly related to whatever she’s working on at the time.

“Yeah?”

The guy arrives, hand extended. “Ellen, how are you?” Sensing her hesitation, he adds, “Val Brady.”

Oh.

Yeah.

The reason she didn’t recognize him immediately, apart from the fact that they haven’t met in a while, is that he’s one of the few journalists she hasn’t ended up fighting with-this guy, and Jimmy Gilroy, and maybe one or two others. It’s the ones she doesn’t get along with that she tends to remember.

“Val. What’s up?”

He nods his head back in the direction of the cordoned-off area. “Just another day at the office. You?”

“No. I’m… I’m just passing. I heard, though.”

“Pretty wild, isn’t it?”

Val Brady is a reporter for the New York Times, and a fairly reliable one. A couple of years ago they shared information on a story, some big-pharma-related thing, as she remembers. He was scrupulous about it, careful, didn’t let his ego bleed into the proceedings.

She liked him.

“Yeah. Any clue about what happened?”

Brady takes off his shades. He looks around, then looks back at Ellen. “He was shot at point-blank range, in the forehead. They didn’t take his wallet, which apparently had a couple of hundred bucks in it, or his iPod. And no witnesses.” He points up at the apartment buildings on Fifth. “The cops are going to check over there, the high floors, see if anyone was looking out of their window. But given the angle and stuff it’s a long shot.”

Ellen considers this. “Surveillance cameras?”

Brady shakes his head. “There are a few in the park, but not back there, and they’re mainly used for detecting after-hours activity.”

“What about the bigger picture, is there anything known to be going on, I mean with Northwood, or…?” She laughs. “Jesus, listen to me. I sound like your editor. Sorry.”

“You’re fine. It’s an obvious question. And to answer it, no, not that I’m aware of, not yet, anyway.” He pauses, and fiddles for a bit with his shades. “So, Ellen, what are you up to these days?”

She explains. Presidential candidates and why so many of them tend to implode.

“Okay, yeah. I read that piece you did on John Rundle a while back, the whole Congo thing, the stuff with his brother. It was amazing.”

Ellen grunts. “It was pretty spectacular material, you have to admit. Though I kind of feel like I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel now with Ratt Atkinson.”

Brady laughs. “Ratt. Jesus.”

“I know.” Ellen pauses. “I actually came down here because it felt like there might be some… action. Is that pathetic?”

“No, but are you sure you’re remembering what it’s like to be a news reporter? Real action is pretty hard to come by. It’s usually like this.” He indicates behind him. “The afters, yellow tape, endless waiting around.”

Ellen nods. “Sure. Of course. I remember.” But still. “Sometimes it’s about instinct. You get a hard-on for a story and… I don’t know.”

Brady smiles. “A hard-on, huh? Nice. Well, let me look into it, ask around, and if anything interesting shows up, why don’t I give you a call?”

Is he hitting on her? She doesn’t think so. And she’s hardly his type. Small and lean, with shortish dark hair, Ellen doesn’t really think of herself as anyone’s type. But as if to clarify matters, he holds up his hands. “Look, Ellen, I’m a big admirer of yours, have been for years. All those pieces for Rolling Stone and Wired and The Nation, and then your stuff for Parallax? I mean… shit.”

It’s easy for Ellen to forget that her reputation isn’t all bad, that it can sometimes extend to beyond a roll call of character defects, that she has a body of work behind her, and stuff that someone like Val Brady here might actually hold in high regard.

“Okay,” she says, going with it, “thanks.”

In the cab a while later, she tries to do a little rearranging in her head. Ratt Atkinson she can dispose of today, at a push. It’s not a complicated story, all the details have already been fact-checked, and it’ll tell itself, really.

That’ll give her time tomorrow to read up on Jeff Gale.

And on Northwood Leffingwell.

She looks out the window of the cab, Amsterdam Avenue flickering past, and realizes something.

It’s been a while, but she’s excited.

2

“SO, HOW IS THE OLD MAN?”

Craig Howley watches John Kemp wince a little as he says this, but there’s really no other way for him to put it.

They both know what he’s asking.

Howley looks around, surveys the room. At least they’re not talking about Jeff Gale anymore. “He’s fine, you know. Not as young as he used to be. It’s nothing specific, just a gradual…” He pauses, catching himself here. “He’s fine.”

“Yeah.”

James Vaughan. Chairman of the Oberon Capital Group. Eighty-four years old, born a week before the Crash. Which turned out to be a good omen actually, at least as far as his old man was concerned, because later that very week the same William J. Vaughan shorted a pool of stocks on a downtick and cleared over a hundred million dollars.

All these years later and what’s changed?

“He hasn’t stopped working or anything,” Howley says.

“Oh sure, of course.” Kemp has a knowing look on his face. “Guess he wants to go out with his boots on.”

“No, but really, John, I mean it.” An edge in Howley’s voice now. “He’s still chairman and CEO. He’s still running things.”

Kemp nods along, but doesn’t pursue it. It’s a cocktail party, Saturday evening, East Hampton.

There’s a time and a place.

Which is just as well, Howley thinks. Because it’s bad enough to have a little WSJ prick like John Kemp fishing for gossip about Jimmy Vaughan, but here? With these people?

He moves along, glass in hand, mingling. Never his strong suit. Jessica is working the other side of the room, tireless as ever in promoting her latest gala benefit for the Kurtzmann Foundation. Howley admires the ease with which she carries herself in any setting. Although he’s now the number two at Oberon, and thus one of the top financial dogs in attendance this evening, he still considers himself more of a Pentagon guy than a Wall Street guy. He could effectively buy and sell half of the people here, but he doesn’t feel like he’s one of them.

At the same time, and given the rumors about Vaughan’s health, he knows that the question of who will ultimately take over at Oberon is one of the hot topics of the moment.

And that everyone assumes it’s him. Or at least assumes that he assumes it’s him.

Which he does.

So he has to be careful what he says, and to whom.

Because with Jimmy Vaughan you don’t ever assume anything. You just keep working, making connections, cutting deals, bringing it home.

Naturally enough, Howley does hope it’s him. Being brought in last year as COO is one good indicator, and a very clear public endorsement, but what he believes should be an even more reliable indicator is his actual working relationship with Vaughan. Complex and of many years standing, it’s a relationship that has benefited both of them hugely, a recent example being that thanaxite supply chain they set up out of Afghanistan. It’s been a cordial relationship, too, and generally free of bullshit, which Howley puts down to the fact that he’s not intimidated by Vaughan, and never has been.

“Craig.”

Howley turns.

“Terry.” Hasselbach. Another little prick, hedge fund guy. “How are you?”

“I’m good, yo.”

Howley groans silently, covers it with a smile. He’s twenty-five years older than this guy, just as Jimmy Vaughan is twenty-five years older than him. Which isn’t a problem, not in relation to Vaughan, he doesn’t think about it, but guys like this? Buffed, mouthy Adderall-heads, still in their early or mid-thirties… he doesn’t know, what is it? Anyway, they get talking-stock picks, dream deals-and within minutes two or three others have joined in.

And Howley realizes something.

For all their cockiness and walls of money, these guys are looking to him as some kind of an oracle. It’s clearly the Vaughan factor, a sprinkle of stardust from the old man-who you don’t let down, by the way. He drops you into the number two position at Oberon, you’d better believe you’re some kind of a fucking oracle-believe it and behave accordingly. At the Pentagon, it was a little different. There was always room for ambivalence, room for creative ambiguity. And expectations were different as well, less concrete, less performance-driven. In private equity you either make money or you lose it, and that’s it.

Who has the stones, who doesn’t.

“Where am I looking?” he says, and tilts his head to one side. “Well, I’ll tell you one area, it’s not the only one, but… health care.” This gets a muted response from the hedgies. What, no inside track on the latest DARPA-funded robotics program or new advanced precision-kill weapons system? Apparently not. Howley raises his glass to his lips, taking his time. Then, “Thirty years ago you know how much of our GDP was devoted to health care? Three percent. Now it’s heading for twenty. Think about it. You’ve got a whole generation of baby boomers coming to retirement age, and remember”-he waves his left hand around, to take in the room, the beachfront, the Hamptons-“this is the wealthiest generation of people we’ve ever seen, not just in U.S. history but in the history of the entire fucking world. So you think they’ll spare any expense when it comes to their artificial hips and knees and whatever? When it comes to, I don’t know, stem cell therapies and assisted living technologies? No? Me neither. It’ll be whatever’s required, and that’s going to mean more and more of GDP getting channeled into health care.” Everyone nodding now. “So in my view, over the next ten, fifteen years, investments in the sector will do pretty well.”

This isn’t some big secret or anything, but coming from him, with his signature delivery-conspiratorial, almost whispered-it very much sounds like one. It’s certainly enough to please the assembled pack.

Howley glances over at Jessica. She’s deep in conversation with some chunky, hatchet-faced woman he doesn’t recognize. A member of the board of trustees, no doubt, or the wife of a principal donor. He looks at his watch. He’d like to get out of here soon.

“So, Craig,” Terry Hasselbach says, “what’s this I keep hearing about an IPO?”

Howley turns and glares at him. The IPO story isn’t a big secret either, far from it, there’s been plenty of speculation about Oberon going public in recent days-but it’s not something he’s willing to discuss, not with these guys.

He peers into his glass and swirls what’s left in it around. “Speaking of rumors, Terry,” he says, looking up, “did I read somewhere lately that you were a nosy little cocksucker?”

No one reacts to this for a moment.

Howley keeps looking at him.

Then Terry Hasselbach laughs. It’s a weasely laugh, but it breaks the tension. To move things on, someone brings up Jeff Gale.

Again.

The subject has been unavoidable all day.

“They’re saying he might have been into some mob guys for-”

“Oh, what, gambling debts? Get out of here. That’s ridiculous.”

“No, that it was an escort thing, some agency, and that after Spitzer and all they didn’t want to lose-”

“No way. Besides, a mob hit in Central Park? Fuhgeddaboudit.”

Everyone laughs.

Except Howley, who’s looking at his watch again. He knew Jeff Gale-not well, but he knew him, saw how the man operated, could read him like a book, read all his moves. Gambling and escorts? It’s about as far as you could get from a plausible explanation for this.

That’s what bothers him, the seeming randomness of it, the casualness.

He glances across the room and catches Jessica’s eye.

Ten minutes later they’re in the car and on the way to dinner at Mircof’s in East Quogue.

Sitting alone in a booth at Dave’s Bar & Grill, Frank Bishop sips his second Stoli. It usually takes more than one for that exquisite hot-coals-in-the-belly sensation to hit, but it’s coming now, he can feel it.

Slowly, he takes another sip.

Blue. Icy. Viscous.

This is the sweet spot, alright, portal to a brief sun-kissed season of illumination and understanding. It won’t last very long, a few minutes at most, but that’s fine. In a while he’ll order some food-chicken, fries, plenty of carbs, a club soda-because if he orders a third Stoli he’ll only order a fourth and then a fifth and that’ll be it for the night. He won’t eat and he’ll get stupid and sloppy. He’ll end up feeling like shit and be hungover all day tomorrow. Then, before he knows it, it’ll be Monday morning again and he’ll be back at work.

For now, though, it’s Saturday evening.

He holds up his glass of filmy liquid.

To the LudeX console upgrade, and a long, strange day at Winterbrook Mall.

He takes a sip.

Frank used to be an architect.

Up to a couple of years ago, and for a couple of decades-designing office buildings and airport terminals, frozen music, he ate, drank, and slept the stuff. Worked for Belmont, McCann Associates and had an office in Manhattan. But now? Now he manages an electronics store in a second-tier mall in upstate New York.

WTF.

It’s not as if he’s the only one, though. A dozen others were let go at the same time, and most of them, as far as he knows, are struggling. The younger ones, still in their twenties, either take it on the chin and go off in an entirely different direction, or they obsessively hone their résumés and send them out to anyone they’ve ever come into contact with, co-workers, classmates, contractors, people they meet on fucking Facebook. The older ones, like Frank, mid-forties and beyond, either manage to hang on by trading their experience and skills for much-reduced salaries, or they take anything at all, whatever they can get, retail, driving a cab-it doesn’t matter, really (except for the serious damage this will do to their marketability if they ever want to get back in the game). Frank is one of these, and he figures the damage is already done. The idea of getting back in the game is remote to him anyway, a little intimidating even.

This job he got as a favor. It was through an old connection, a middle-management guy in Paloma he dealt with when Belmont, McCann were doing their new regional headquarters over in Hartford. And he only got it because it was Winterbrook Mall. If it’d been anywhere else, chances are he wouldn’t have been hired. Like Dave’s Bar & Grill, which is beside it, Winterbrook Mall is a relic of the 1980s, morning in Mahopac, and will very probably not survive this recession. In fact, it’s hard to know what’s keeping the place afloat right now. It’s vast, but more often than not deserted, with a distinctly creepy feel to it, especially at night when you could imagine B-movie zombies emerging from behind the fake backdrops of some of the empty retail spaces to search for stragglers and lost shoppers. However, Winterbrook’s biggest problem lies two miles down the road in the shape of the sparkling and relatively new Oak Valley Plaza Outlets Center.

That’s where it’d make sense for Paloma to have their store, but if they did, Frank would be out of work.

He looks into his glass.

The truth is, he’s hanging on by a thread here. There are over eight hundred Paloma stores across the country, and this is probably the only one he’d be able to hold down a job in. And that’s because-with the exception of today-it’s probably the only one that’s empty most of the time.

Which suits Frank just fine.

Not because he can’t do the job, or he’s lazy, it’s just that dealing with people, customers, members of the public… he’s not cut out for it. Heavier foot traffic than the store gets and he’d more than likely crack up. It might take a while, a few weeks, a month or two, but he wouldn’t last-there’d be an incident with someone out on the floor, he’d raise his voice, they’d file a complaint, and who’d end up with their second pink slip in as many years?

For the moment, though, this position he’s got at ghostly, creepy Winterbrook Mall seems secure enough.

Which is a big relief.

He finishes the drink and orders some food.

Because as long as he’s able to meet his basic financial obligations, as long as he’s able to-

Phone.

Vibrating in his pocket.

He pulls it out and looks at it. Lizzie. Pretty much on cue. “Hi there.”

“Hey Dad.”

Tone alert.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m… I’m fine.”

Lizzie’s at Atherton, and even though she got a scholarship it’s still costing him a fortune. She wants to be a Web… something, he can’t remember what exactly. He finds it hard to keep up, to stay in the loop, especially the tech loop. When she was starting out, he was all over it, but that was two years ago.

“So… what’s happening?”

“Not a whole lot. I just wanted to hear your voice.”

Frank looks up, slowly, and out over the dusty, wood-paneled expanse of Dave’s Bar & Grill.

Hear my voice?

“You can hear my voice anytime you want, sweetheart, you know that.”

He swallows. Was that the right thing to say? Lizzie is extremely smart, but she’s hard work sometimes, and you have to know what you’re doing. When she was small, he and Deb had to choose their moments with her. She could be charming, too, of course, and some of the stuff she came out with would blow your socks off. Unfortunately, Lizzie’s teenage years are a bit of a blur to Frank, because after the divorce he burrowed down and didn’t do much else besides work. Then, a year or so before he was laid off, things changed again, and he started making more of an effort to see both her and John. It seemed like a new phase, a new era-college looming, Deb married to someone else, their early lives together as a family in the house in Carroll Gardens receding like a brittle dream. Lizzie hadn’t changed, though, not really, and her renewed presence in his life, her occasional attentions-e-mails, phone calls-sustained him in a way that he hadn’t expected.

“I know, Dad.”

Silence.

Well, at least that’s settled.

“So,” he says, trying again. “Saturday night. What are you up to?” But why does he want to know that? Doesn’t he worry enough about her as it is? With nothing at all to go on? Now he’s fishing for ammo?

“No plans. Just working. I’ve got a paper due.”

He’ll settle for that. Moving his empty glass around the table like a chess piece, he proceeds to tell her about his day, the LudeX upgrade, the early torrent of excited geeks, the subsequent stream of disappointed ones. Trying to make it funny. But at a certain point he realizes she’s not laughing, and then guesses she’s probably not even smiling. Which is when he remembers that Lizzie hates hearing about his job. It freaks her out. She thinks of her old man as an architect who works in Manhattan, not as some loser sales guy in a suburban mall. Either that or she’s racked with guilt about what he has to do to keep her and her brother in their good schools.

Actually, he doesn’t know what she thinks. They’ve never really talked about it. It’s what he imagines she thinks, what he’d think.

What he thinks.

“Have you heard from John?” he asks, interrupting himself, changing the subject. John’s at grad school in California doing a master’s in genetics and microbiology and only surfaces every few months for a little air.

“Yeah, I spoke to him last week. He’s good. Still seems to be with that German girl, Claudia, is it? They’ll be getting married before you know it and moving to Frankfurt or Berlin or someplace. You up for some German-speaking grandkids?”

This is news to Frank, though it makes sense. John was always the quiet one, straight as an arrow. “Sure. Why not? Though it’s a pity he didn’t hook up with someone Spanish or Italian. Better food and weather.” Stupid joke. He pauses. “There’s the Bauhaus stuff, I suppose. Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, and Le Corbusier, although I think Le Corbusier was Swiss.” He’s rambling here. He stops. In the silence that follows there’s a strange-

“Lizzie?”

Nothing for a second, and then, “Yep.” But it’s more of a gulp.

She’s crying.

“Lizzie? What is it?”

Out of the corner of his eye, Frank sees the waitress approaching with a tray. He doesn’t look at her directly but holds up a hand, to wave her away.

“Lizzie? Sweetheart. What is it?”

He holds his breath, to hear better.

“Oh, it’s nothing… I’m just…” She snuffles loudly and clears her throat. “You know.”

Does he? He looks at his watch. He could be up there in two hours. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine, just a stupid hormonal bitch.” More recovery noises. “I’m sorry, Dad.”

“Oh, Lizzie, don’t…”

Even though she’s not there-in front of him, physically-Frank’s need to reach out for her right now and hold her is overwhelming. It even makes him feel a little sick. Any display of vulnerability on Lizzie’s part has always cut through him like a knife.

When she was four years old, or maybe five, she-

Jesus, Frank.

“Lizzie, do you want me to come up there?” he says. “I could easily make it in a-”

“No, Dad. Come on.” She’s laughing now, or at least pretending to.

And so it goes.

Later, driving along the back roads to where he’s renting an apartment near West Mahopac, Frank replays the conversation in his head, looking out for clues, a reason, something to explain why Lizzie was so upset. He spins various theories out, elaborate ones, simple ones, but in the end he just doesn’t know.

And, sadly-experience tells him-he probably never will.

All through the afternoon and early evening Ellen Dorsey works on the Ratt Atkinson profile, trawling through his eight-year gubernatorial record and clacking out three and a half thousand words of boilerplate magazine prose. At about nine o’clock she decides she’s had enough, that she can do the rest tomorrow. She then switches her focus to the Jeff Gale story. She’s had the TV on in the background the whole time and for the last hour or so has been checking Twitter-and semi-psychotically, every three or four minutes at least. But there don’t seem to be any developments, none that she can see from the screen in the corner of her living room at any rate. On Twitter, predictably, there’s plenty of the usual idiotic comment and meaningless bile to keep things ticking over.

She flicks around a few of the news websites, but it’s the same everywhere.

TOP BANKER SHOT IN CENTRAL PARK.

That’s it, no details, no explanations, no theories even.

The thing about instant news is that it’s, well, instant… but nowhere near fast enough. It’s addictive, but you’re never satisfied. Ellen works hard at what she does-but the inescapable fact here is that she works for a monthly publication.

A periodical.

Both of which terms sound like Victorian euphemisms for something else entirely.

Parallax magazine has been around for more than forty years and has a reputation-it’s known for its investigative reporting, its long-form pieces, and its uncompromising, ballsy attitude. Max Daitch, the latest in a long line of the magazine’s fearless editors, and the one Ellen has mostly worked with, is indeed fearless, but even though he’s young-younger than she is by three or four years-he’s been heard to quote H. L. Mencken and is really just a couple of sandwiches short of wearing a bow tie. Which means that her habits in recent years have been shaped by this traditionalist, analog regime, even though her instincts remain resolutely progressive and digital. Her MO for Parallax, for example, has been to burrow, slowly, patiently, sifting through mountains of information with a view to building a “case.” But these days, no longer in her thirties, what she’d prefer to be doing, and got to do briefly with Jimmy Gilroy back when the John Rundle story broke-and felt she was maybe trying to do earlier today when she went down to Central Park-is identify a breaking story… find a curve, get out ahead of it, and stay there.

A change of pace.

You can’t force it, though.

She tidies her desk for a few minutes, rearranging stuff and clearing a little space. Then she sits back, puts her feet on the desk, and phones her sister. Michelle lives in a beautiful split-level colonial in the suburbs of Philadelphia, is married to the financial controller of a fair-trade import company, and has two exceptionally bright kids. Which is fine, for Michelle… but the thing is, every once in a while Ellen needs a vicarious hit of all this, of the supposed normality of her sister’s domestic setup, so she gets Michelle on the phone and pumps her for information, stuff about the house, about her and Dan, about the kids-what they’re doing at school, what medications they’re on, how many boxes in the pages of the DSM they’re currently checking off. But when Michelle tries to turn the tables on big sis, Ellen clams up, declaring same old, same old.

Same apartment, same obsessive workload.

Same lack of social skills, same monthly subscription to Bad Mood magazine.

It’s become a routine, but a curiously comforting one.

After she gets off the phone with Michelle, Ellen orders up Thai food. While she’s waiting, she grabs the remote and surfs around the cable news channels. The only thing giving the Jeff Gale story a run for its money today, in terms of high-end prurience, is the Connie Carillo murder trial. At the moment, some MSNBC talking head is reviewing the week’s evidence. “Look, it’s simple,” he’s saying, “she clearly needs a lifeline, because even though no motive has been established yet, she just, I don’t know, radiates guilt…”

The she here is Constance “Connie” Carillo, daughter of Senator Eugene Pendleton and ex-wife of mob boss Ricky “Icepick” Carillo. A powerful soprano, Connie was about to make her debut at the Met in Salome when her husband of the time, investment banker Howard Meeker, was found naked on the kitchen floor of their Upper East Side apartment with a carving knife stuck in his chest. Connie was immediately charged with his murder, and since the trial started a couple of weeks ago, the court proceedings have been broadcast live every day, with updates, highlights, commentary, and wall-to-wall analysis. In media terms, it’s been pretty much full-spectrum dominance.

But this being a Saturday, there’s something of a vacuum to fill.

So Jeff Gale’s timing couldn’t have been better.

And although Ellen, like most people, has been following the trial pretty closely, she has no difficulty now in dropping it for this. She presses the mute button and throws the remote onto the sofa. She goes back to her desk and starts digging up anything she can find on the “gunned-down” banker.

As she reads, she jots down notes on a loose sheet of graph paper.

Born in Carthage, North Carolina, forty-seven years ago, Jeff Gale majored in psychology and economics at NCSU and then got an MBA at Harvard Business School before going on to do stints at Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo. After five years at Citigroup he was appointed vice president of the New York Federal Reserve, and then, just in time to see the company clock up losses of nearly $4.2 billion, he took over as CEO of Northwood Leffingwell. Amid embarrassing lawsuits over the bank’s foreclosure practices, as well as SEC claims that statements he made to Congress may have misrepresented Northwood’s health, Gale’s tenure at the bank was not an easy one. More recently, however, things seemed to have been looking up, with the bank’s share price finally crawling out of the single digits.

Gale was married and had two teenage daughters. A Forbes profile describes him as obsessive and detail oriented. Standard stuff, then, and fairly tedious, but it’s a brand of tedium that Ellen has grown used to over the years. It’s part of her stock-in-trade-wading through data and looking for patterns, glitches, the one thing no one else sees.

She goes through some photos of Gale now, on Google Images, but doesn’t see anything of any interest at all. Apart from the fact that he was about five-ten, pale, and balding.

She looks over at the TV. They keep going back to the crime scene in Central Park, recycling the few precious, banal facts that are known about the case. Ellen finds all of this frustrating. If she were working on the story herself-for a paper, say, like Val Brady is-what would she be doing now? Would she be on the phone to this or that contact? Would she be camped outside Jeff Gale’s house?

Maybe.

But if so, wouldn’t she need a little more to work with, a lead, something concrete?

When the food arrives, Ellen gets a beer from the fridge and sets up at the kitchen table.

She eats in silence, staring over at her desk.

Something bugging her.

What is it?

Ever since she did that piece on John Rundle with Jimmy Gilroy a year and a half ago, nothing has been the same. He called her up out of the blue one afternoon, this diffident, inexperienced Irish journalist, and within a couple of days she was involved in the fastest-moving, most exciting story she’d ever worked on. Senator John Rundle, sniffing out the possibility of a party presidential nomination, was found to have lied about a trip he made to the Congo on behalf of his brother, Clark, CEO of engineering giant BRX-a trip on which a private security contractor just happened to “go postal” in a tiny village and massacre nine people. As if that wasn’t enough, Clark Rundle was subsequently indicted for murdering the owner of the private security company by bashing the man’s brains in with a fucking laptop.

She and Gilroy led on every aspect of the story, scooping all other news outlets, and then drawing the whole thing neatly together for the next issue of Parallax. It was a thrilling time in her professional life, a definite high point, but these days she can’t shake off the suspicion, even the fear, that she was perceived to have gone too far-and that she’ll never be permitted to go that far again.

Why, and by whom, remains a mystery, but she’s been around long enough to know that certain people just don’t like people like her. Over the years she’s been harassed, followed, and offered money and had her various accounts hacked into. This feels different, though, more subtle. Recession notwithstanding, Parallax has lost a lot of advertising revenue recently, and for his part Max Daitch hasn’t seemed quite as fearless as he once did. Maybe it’s her imagination, maybe not, but the atmosphere around the office has had a weirdly muted feel of late.

As for Jimmy Gilroy, Ellen doesn’t know. He sort of disappeared into the story in a way she’s rarely seen. He was of the opinion that what they did together only scratched the surface, and from what she understands he has spent the last eighteen months immersed in a follow-up piece, excavating the background to the original story, but sinking ever deeper into it, traveling to London, Paris, and the Congo.

Getting lost, chasing ghosts.

She pushes the remainder of her food aside and finishes what’s left of the beer.

But does she envy him this for some reason? Maybe. She certainly envies someone something. What that is, or might be, exactly, she doesn’t know. On consideration, though-and looking over at her desk again-she knows it probably isn’t the Jeff Gale story.

Or shouldn’t be.

And as if to confirm this, her phone rings.

She picks it up and looks at the display.

Val Brady.

She hesitates, but lets it ring out. Then she waits for a moment and checks to see if he’s left a message.

He has. “Hi, Ellen, Val Brady here. Er… nothing really, I just thought I’d check in with you, seeing as how we were, you know… talking today. Funny thing about this story, it’s… it’s flat, there’s nothing there. I’ve talked to a lot of people since this morning, associates of Gale’s, people who knew him well, people who could even be classed as adversaries of his, in a business sense, but it all comes across as so fucking boring, you know? He does, they do, that whole world. I mean, these people don’t go around shooting each other, that’s for sure. So maybe it was just one of those random things.” He pauses. Ellen looks over at the window, out at the darkening, orange-washed street. “Hey,” Brady goes on, “I just feel bad that that hard-on of yours had to go to waste, you know. Maybe next time.” Another pause, during which she can feel the recoil from his brain exploding. “Listen, Ellen”-this quickly-“I’ll talk to you again, okay? Take it easy.”

Poor bastard, he couldn’t resist it. Or make it sound like he was one of the boys.

But-

Something weird.

She walks over to the window and stands there looking down, thinking… what if he’s wrong? What if he’s wrong about all of it?

His approach, his conclusion.

Some people walk by on the other side of the street, huddled into their coats, laughing.

A yellow cab passes.

What was it he said… the story was flat and they were all so boring?

And then it hits her.

Of course.

None of that is the point, is it?

She turns back around and glances at the TV, where for the hundredth time today they’re showing the scene down in Central Park-the yellow tape, the guys in baggy white suits, the photographers, the media pack, the onlookers.

That’s the point.

She walks toward the corner of the room, staring directly now at what’s on the screen.

Calculating… extrapolating.

And suddenly she’s sure. It’s as real as a headache.

This is going to happen again.

3

IF ALICE HARVILL HOLLAND WEREN’T ICED RIGHT NOW ON TRIBURBAZINE, this dinner would be a lot less bearable than it is. She hasn’t been able to eat, though. Not properly, anyway. She’s had a few morsels, a pickled beet, some of the smoked yucca, a fried plantain, but that’s all. And it’s such a shame, because the food here at Bra is usually so exquisite. She can’t drink, either. With Triburbazine you absolutely can’t drink.

Unless, of course, that is, you’d prefer to. Before slipping into a coma.

And a nice one… deep, thick, lasting.

To sleep, perchance to dream.

She picks up her Veen.

But you make your choices.

She looks over at Bob. He’s talking nonstop, and has been since this morning when the news broke. Jeff Gale this, Jeff Gale that and Jeff Gale the goddamn other thing.

She knows it’s all very shocking, but right now “shocking” is a bizarrely relative term.

The other two-their guests, the Spellmans-are happy to let the great Bob Holland dominate the conversation. Toby Spellman is a wuss in any case, and Lynn is clearly afraid of Alice, won’t even look at her.

So the dynamic at the table isn’t great.

“He was going to turn things around for Northwood,” Bob is saying, “no doubt about it, it was just a question of time.” He forks a roasted scallop into his mouth and chews, impatient to go on talking. “He’d gotten all of that SEC shit behind him, the hearings were over, and most of the MUI documentation had been shredded. Far as I could see it was a clean slate going forward.” He shakes his head. “Absolutely tragic.”

Alice glances at Lynn. She’s a brittle creature, pretty in a grotesque sort of way. Trying too hard, and yet not trying hard enough. What is she, thirty-six, thirty-seven? Wait till she hits fifty. If she makes it that far.

Alice is fifty-two.

Unbidden, an image floats into her mind of Lynn stretched out naked on a marble slab, writhing, all pale and skinny. It’s not a sexual image. God forbid. More like something cold and scientific, a specimen, a bacterium wriggling in a petri dish.

She exhales loudly.

Bob is still talking.

More food arrives.

A cigarette would be nice at this point. Pity she doesn’t smoke.

“Yeah, but listen, Toby, it’s simple.” Bob raises an index finger. “Profit outsourcing, that’s the key to this thing, always has been. Low overseas tax rates…”

And on it goes.

Pork belly, snapper, mango, coffee.

People gliding past, greetings from across the room, fluttering fingers, flushed faces. Music that’s barely identifiable as music, more like some chilly blue vapor rippling down her spine.

Without warning, Lynn turns to look at her, wide-eyed, smile sharp as a blade.

“Alice,” she says softly, “are you okay?”

Oh yes.

Alice nodding it, oh yes, oh yes.

Eventually, the dinner draws to a close. They get up to leave, are given their coats, shuffle out onto the broad, breezy expanse of Columbus Avenue. And here, standing under the sidewalk canopy, waiting for their car to pull up, and gazing south over a bobbing river of yellow cabs to an elegant redbrick apartment building on the other side of the avenue, Alice Harvill Holland comes to a curious realization. Dr. Engdahl prescribed her the Triburbazine for anxiety and nausea, both of which she’s been suffering from lately, and on what has seemed like an industrial scale-but it’s as if he knew she’d need something even stronger, somehow knew she’d need more protection… the pharmaceutical equivalent, say, of Kevlar, or a plutonium suit, or just plain cotton wool, but miles and miles of it, wrapped around her, endlessly, soundlessly, layer after layer after layer.

But why? For what?

For this.

She sees it all in slow motion, and doesn’t move a muscle, doesn’t feel her heart rate increase by a single beat, doesn’t flinch. The two figures rush forward, one raising a gloved hand and pointing it at her husband’s head, the other efficiently elbowing Toby Spellman in the abdomen and pushing him to the ground.

Lynn’s hysterical scream and the gunshot come in the same moment. The scream lasts a good bit longer, though-enough to soundtrack the violent sideways lurch of Bob’s head, the ripping apart of his face, his backward collapse onto the sidewalk and the rapid retreat down the block, through the panicking, parting crowds, of the two…

The two… what’s the word?

Perps.

Yes, that’s it.

She looks around, speckles of blood everywhere now, on the sidewalk, on her own dress, even on Lynn’s contorted face, a part of Alice wondering if some of this isn’t maybe more than blood, if it isn’t lumpier, gristlier, if some of this isn’t, in fact, tissue from Bob’s brain.

And the man had a serious brain. When they met, over twelve years ago, he was day-trading in his shorts from the apartment he’d lived in with his first wife-who left him because he was day-trading, and to the exclusion of all else. It took him a few years, but he made over twenty million dollars at it, partnering up with some equity guys and then starting his own shop.

The rest is history.

They didn’t call him Exponential Bob for nothing.

But here, tonight, that’s all over. His second wife gazes out from under the canopy of a restaurant on Columbus Avenue, and it’s quite a scene… Bob dead on the sidewalk, Toby Spellman crouched down next to him, Lynn Spellman having a sort of epileptic fit while still standing… Alice herself frozen, like a model, posing for a photo long after the photographer has gone.

All around her now the nighttime colors and textures of the city are stretching, and in every direction, like pizza dough or chewing gum. There are sirens, too, rising, piercing, closing in. But a few moments later, when the police arrive, something happens. The adrenaline in Alice’s body kicks in, digs in, starts going to work on what’s left of the Triburbazine.

“I’m Detective Brogan,” she hears a voice saying. “With the NYPD.”

She turns and looks into the man’s pasty Irish face.

“I understand this is your husband,” he says.

She nods.

“Can you tell me his name, who he is?”

“Yes.” She stares down at the body. “His name is Bob Holland.” She starts to shake at last, and uncontrollably, her hands, her arms, even her voice. “He works on Wall Street. He runs a… a hedge fund, Chambers Capital Management.”