Money to Burn

36

I WASTED THE RIDE BACK FROM LONG ISLAND. I SHOULD HAVE PUT the top down on the Mini Cooper, cranked up just enough heat to take off the chill, and felt the wind on my face as the lights of Manhattan and the world’s most recognizable skyline swallowed me up. When I bought my convertible, I had signed a contract stating that I would drive it 90 percent of the time with the roof open. It was a marketing joke, but the way things were going, I wondered if they might actually sue me.

Yes, I was sweating the small stuff-like where the hell I was going to sleep tonight.

The Saxton Silvers parking garage was my destination, mainly because it was free and I still hadn’t straightened out my cash flow. To get there, I had to pass the firm’s main entrance on Seventh Avenue. Television crews, photographers, and a phalanx of other people crowded the sidewalk outside the revolving doors, and a line of double-parked media vans hugged the curb. A small but vocal group of demonstrators marched in a circle in the middle of all this. Anger was all over their faces, even angrier words on their handmade signs:

CROOKS!

SCREW YOUR BONUS. WHERE’S MY PENSION?

I was suddenly thinking of Ivy again and that day we’d stumbled into the FTAA riots in Miami. I rounded the block and pulled into the garage.

My Mini made a funny noise when I shut off the engine. To me, it definitely sounded like the carburetor, except that I hadn’t owned a car with a carburetor since I dumped the 1975 Monte Carlo after B-school. That was how much I knew about auto mechanics.

Apparently, about as much as I knew about Ivy.

Mallory had been right: Over the last four years I’d fooled myself into thinking that I had moved on, but I hadn’t. Perhaps my reaction now should have been one of sheer joy: Ivy is alive! There was some of that, to be sure. But it was much more complicated.

Why did you run, Ivy?

The funny noise in my engine stopped, but I remained in my car, thinking. I still hadn’t resolved the small things, but now it was the big stuff that consumed me. My personal portfolio had vanished into cyberspace. Saxton Silvers stock had dropped 90 percent in value. The FBI seemed to think that I was the traitor who’d used Chuck Bell and the power of FNN to bring down my own firm. Bell was now dead, and I was apparently being blamed for that, too. To top it all off, my wife was divorcing me over a dead woman who-suddenly-was no longer dead.

The timing of it all made me consider a dark possibility: What if Ivy didn’t share the joy I felt over a potential reunion? What if she had come back from the dead, so to speak, only to visit on Michael Cantella a fate worse than death?

Couldn’t be. Or could it?

My thoughts drifted back four years to our sailing trip and the dream I had told her about-the one about riding my bicycle on a dark highway, getting run off the road, and rushing my injured dog Tippy to the DQ. The gist of that strange dream had actually happened: A week before our trip, a black SUV had knocked me into a ravine and left me for dead. Afterward-and this was the reason for the nightmares-I wondered if the driver had been a Wall Street loser with a score to settle.

It’s only gonna get worse. That had been the warning from the anti-FTAA demonstrator who pulled me from the taxi in Miami. I had always wondered if he was really just talking about corporate greed. Was it possible that the same maniac had followed us to the Bahamas and played some role in Ivy’s disappearance? Again, I had to ask:

Why did you come back, Ivy?

Were the last few days payback for ruining her life? Did she finally emerge from hiding only to move my money into an offshore account and make me out as the villain behind the destruction of Saxton Silvers? Did she also destroy my marriage? Was she done with me yet? Those were terrible thoughts about a woman I loved. But with four years to plan it, Ivy was definitely smart enough to implement such a scheme, and with her birthday-orene52/25enero-at the root of my passwords, I had to consider the possibility. And after all, I couldn’t shake the memory that, in my dream, the hit-and-run driver of the SUV had been Ivy.

Stop it. Ivy would never-

My phone rang. It was Eric Volke. He and our CEO had spent the last twelve hours at the New York Federal Reserve in downtown Manhattan, in a room once used to cash coupons on Treasury bills. On the other side of the table had been the masters of the world’s biggest economy-the Federal Reserve chairman, the secretary of the treasury, the New York Fed chief, and the Securities and Exchange Commission chief.

Eric was calling from his limo. “Meet me at my house in thirty minutes,” he told me. “It’s important.”

He hung up before I could ask what it was about.

But I already knew.