The Garden of Betrayal

3

I was on a conference call with a group of fund managers late that afternoon, going over pretty much the same points I’d been covering all day. My voice was hoarse, and I was scanning headlines while half listening to repetitive questions, struggling to stay in front of the news. Everything I knew was already in my written bulletins, but I’d learned long ago that people are more likely to believe things if they hear you say them.

“It depends,” I said, in response to a question about who might be responsible. “If the completion ceremony was just a target of opportunity, with the primary intent of killing a bunch of diplomats, then your guess is as good as mine. It could have been Islamic fundamentalists seizing the moment, Chechens working off old grievances, or some other terrorist organization. But if the goal was to make a statement about the pipeline per se, then it seems reasonable to ask who has motive. The countries most unhappy about the Nord Stream pipeline are Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic, Belarus, and Slovakia. They all stand to lose the transit fees they’ve been earning from the existing pipelines that pass through their territory, and-more to the point-they all become significantly more vulnerable to energy blackmail from Russia.”

“Natural gas is cheap now,” one of the listeners interrupted. “Why can’t the Ukrainians and the Poles and the rest of them just buy from someone else?”

I stifled a sigh. My clients were financiers, accustomed to moving money and securities around the world at the tap of a computer key. Logistics was as esoteric a subject to them as mortgage-backed securities had been to everyone else prior to the housing meltdown.

“First,” I said, intent on correcting as many misapprehensions as possible, “natural gas is only cheap now because the economy tanked. And because it’s cheap now, a lot of companies have canceled exploration and development projects. All of which means that prices are likely to go to the moon as soon as demand picks up again.”

“Is that a prediction, mate?” an Australian voice asked.

“Absolutely. Second, the ex-Eastern Bloc countries can’t buy from someone else, because gas moves most economically through pipelines, and the only producer their pipelines connect with is Russia. Nobody’s going to invest the money to change that anytime soon, because pipelines are expensive, and eastern Europe isn’t that big a market. The Russians have been over a barrel for the last decade, because the routing of the existing pipelines meant that they couldn’t interrupt delivery of gas to eastern Europe without also interrupting delivery to western Europe. The Nord Stream pipeline changes that by making a direct connection to Germany under the Baltic Sea. And the Ukrainians and the Poles and all the other former Soviet clients and republics that have been trying to put distance between themselves and their former master are keenly aware of the fact that it’s difficult to ignore a neighbor who can turn off your lights and heat.”

“The speaker of the Russian Duma accused the Ukrainians on Moscow radio,” someone else said. “How likely does that seem to you?”

“Russia bit the bullet on western exports and turned off Ukraine’s gas twice in the last five years, once in January 2006 and once in March 2008, because of arguments over subsidized pricing. The ultranationalists in the Ukrainian coalition government made some ugly threats at the time. That puts them at the top of everyone’s suspect list.”

“So, you think they did it?” the same voice demanded.

“My opinion is that who actually did it isn’t important in the short run. What matters is how the Russians react. They’re going to be under enormous pressure to hit back hard and fast, and as the United States learned to its detriment in Iraq, intelligence has a way of providing the answers politicians want. Which raises the question of how NATO will respond if Russia threatens military action against one of the former Soviet republics.”

A message from Alex popped up on my screen as two callers began arguing with each other about the likelihood of the Ukrainians having sponsored the attack. Drink? it read. I checked my watch. It was only a little past four, and I still had a huge amount of work to do. I hadn’t been out with Alex in a while, though, and I knew how he must be feeling. There are no secrets on trading floors-Alex had gotten creamed. I wavered a moment and then typed back: Fifteen minutes.

“I have time for two more questions.”

“What’s your best trade?” another voice asked.

“The slope of the forward price curve. Let’s take a look at the ICE closing prices for Brent…”

Alex was at his desk in his office, typing something on his computer. I tapped on his door and then took a seat, waiting for him to finish. He’d changed his shirt, but he still looked like hell. I was always taken aback to notice how worn and bloated he’d become-in my mind’s eye, I always saw the skinny, engaging kid I’d first met a decade ago, a kinetic-market wonk with short-cropped hair and black-framed glasses who bore a passing likeness to Buddy Holly and wore his khaki pants too short. I’d been a top-ranked Wall Street analyst at the time, and Alex had been a recent college grad trying to make a go of his own small fund. Walter, a major client, had leaned on me, insisting that I spend time with him. Alex overcame my initial reluctance by being smart and entertaining. We fell into the habit of talking regularly-about work, and other things. Protective of my constrained time with Claire and the kids, I rarely invited professional acquaintances home, but I liked Alex enough to extend an invitation. He’d been a hit, charming Claire with his interest in the arts, and Kate and Kyle with a repertoire of simple card tricks and a willingness to play hide-and-seek. I remember thinking that he was exactly the kind of vivacious, intellectually curious young adult I hoped my own children would become. Claire insisted that I invite him back so she could fatten him up a little, but his luck had already begun to turn bad, and the return visit had been postponed and eventually abandoned.

“Tough day,” I said.

“For lots of people.” Alex pushed his glasses up with one hand to massage raw-looking indentations on either side of his nose. “What’s the death count now?”

“North of three hundred.” The only good news I’d received all day was a follow-up text from Gavin, saying that he and his family had made it back to England safely.

He winced.

“And here I am feeling sorry for myself because I got my socks blown off by the market. It puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?”

Yes and no. Tragedy put unimportant things in perspective, but genuine pain was tougher to mitigate. Alex had been born with enough money to support any lifestyle he chose, but the only thing he really wanted was his father’s approval. He’d been working at it as long as I knew him, and the harder he worked, the more it eluded him.

“How bad did you get hurt?” I inquired, thinking it was marginally less awkward than not asking.

“Drink first,” he said.

We rode the elevator down together and walked around the corner to Pagliacci, an upscale restaurant-cum-lounge that was usually deserted at this time of day. The wallpaper, the cocktail napkins, and the bar menu were all decorated with clowns; even the light fixtures had clown faces stamped on the brass escutcheons. The place gave me the creeps, but Alex liked it for some reason. The barman saw us come in and reached for a bottle of Stoli. He settled a half-full highball glass in front of Alex as we took stools at the empty bar, then tipped his chin at me.

“Amstel.”

Alex gulped at his glass three times, and the barman hit him again.

“You want to talk about it?” I ventured.

“Let me ask you a question,” he said, staring down at the bar. “I’ve been hearing guys in the office call me Eddie behind my back. What’s that about?”

Walter had named his firm after a classic American muscle car, the Ford AC Cobra. His first few apprentices who’d spun out on their own had followed suit, calling their funds Mustang and Charger. It caught on. When Alex briefly ran his own fund, he’d named it Torino. Like the Cobra, the Torino was a Ford.

“No idea,” I said.

“You could do me a favor.”

“What’s that?”

“You could not lie to me.”

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Five years back, when I’d been foundering, Alex was the one who’d persuaded his father to throw me a lifeline. I was indebted to him. I didn’t want to hurt him, but I didn’t see that I had any choice.

“Eddie comes from Edsel.”

He nodded and took another swallow of his drink. The Ford Edsel was Detroit’s most infamous mistake, a hugely touted vehicle that had failed utterly.

“That’s funny,” he said. “The Edsel was named after Henry Ford’s kid, right?”

I nodded.

“Who came up with that?”

“I don’t know.”

He swiveled on his stool to face me.

“Didn’t I already ask you not to fucking lie to me?”

I picked up my beer and took a sip, meeting his gaze levelly. I really didn’t know who’d come up with it. Jokes and nicknames swept across trading floors like wildfires, and you rarely learned the source. What I did know was that there were a lot of guys who resented Alex because he was the boss’s son, and because anyone else with Alex’s track record would have been out on his ass years ago.

“I’m sorry,” he apologized a few moments later. “I’m kind of a wreck right now.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

The barman cutting limes a few feet away was obviously listening, so I suggested we move to a table. Alex had his glass refilled first. Less than ten minutes after walking through the door and he was on the equivalent of his fifth drink. We settled in a corner beneath a clock with oversized clown feet swinging side to side like a pendulum. A polka dot-painted arm protruding from the side rocked back and forth in time with the feet, perpetually threatening to launch a cream pie.

“You know what sucks?” Alex asked, elbows on the table as he rubbed his scalp with both hands.

“What?”

“That you’re such a hard guy to whine to.”

I gave him a smile to acknowledge the humor in the remark. It was something I’d noticed-people were self-conscious about complaining around me. Almost no matter their difficulty, my hardship trumped theirs.

“I just wish…”

“What?” I asked, as he trailed off.

“I made mistakes back when I had Torino. My dad says that mistakes are contagious.”

His mistake had been trying to launch his own fund fresh out of graduate school, the way Walter had launched Cobra when he left the army. But where Walter succeeded, Alex had failed, as almost anyone his age would. His confidence had never recovered.

“You can’t change the past,” I said, repeating a truth I struggled to accept every day.

“Maybe not,” he mumbled. “But it’s like that butterfly thing. Everything might have been different.”

I leaned back in my chair unhappily. It was something I’d seen before-guys who got smacked around by the market, and who became obsessed with some specific event or decision that had gone the wrong way. Like the former high school quarterback who’d be playing in the pros if only the coach had let him pass more the night the college scout came around, they became convinced that everything would have worked out fine if it hadn’t been for that one unlucky moment. It was a level of delusion I hadn’t seen Alex descend to before, and if he’d been anyone else, I would have finished my beer and walked out on him. I’d spent too much time with drunken traders to have any patience for their particular brand of self-pity. Alex was different, though. It wasn’t just that I was grateful to him. I cared about him, if only because he so clearly needed to be cared about. I wanted him to be happy.

“Listen,” I said, reaching out to nudge his shoulder. “Can I be honest with you?”

“Of course,” he answered stiffly.

“You’ve been giving this job your best shot for years. Maybe it’s time to admit that the hedge-fund business isn’t what you’re cut out for. Look at me: I’m a smart guy, but I realized long ago that I don’t have the constitution to pull the trigger every day. And look at the people who are successful-a lot of them are just riding for a fall. Fifty percent of everything is luck. You know that. So why continue to beat yourself up?”

“You think generating return is about being lucky?” he demanded acidly.

“You think luck isn’t important?” I countered.

“For most guys. But what about people like my father? The ones who never blow up?”

Walter had thrived during the financial implosion, hoarding Treasuries and relentlessly shorting the banks. His success had burnished his already immaculate reputation to a godlike sheen.

“The ones who haven’t blown up yet, you mean. Read some history. Napoleon looked pretty good until he took off for Moscow. Anybody can roll snake eyes.”

Alex opened his mouth and then visibly bit back an angry reply, taking another slug from his glass.

“You should be focused on the political stuff,” I advised. “There’s a big opportunity for you there.”

He shook his head dismissively.

“Why not?”

“I’d prefer banging cocktail waitresses,” he muttered sarcastically. “That was the job Fredo got, wasn’t it?”

Alex was being both stubborn and stupid. Walter and his circle had left Washington alone until the late nineties, when a handful of congressmen made a halfhearted attempt to regulate hedge funds in the wake of the Long-Term Capital Management disaster. Once politics caught their interest, it hadn’t taken them long to figure out that it wasn’t dissimilar to the other arenas they played in, save that the trick was pushing money into the game without breaking any rules, as opposed to taking it out. They had a lot of money, and they were very good at working around the rules. Walter’s latest stratagem was to channel his coterie’s largesse through a new, ostensibly independent public advocacy group: Americans for Free Markets. He’d suggested that Alex become the group’s first CEO. Alex-predictably-had interpreted the offer as a vote of no confidence in his trading abilities, and sunk deeper into his funk.

“You’re not thinking about this right,” I said, wishing I could cut through the bitterness and disappointment to the Alex I used to know. “You could become very influential.”

He shrugged and drained his glass, rattling the ice cubes at the barman. I kept quiet against my better judgment, wondering if I was going to have to carry him home.

“That reminds me,” he said, when the barman had left. “I’m supposed to invite you to the NASCAR lunch tomorrow.”

NASCAR was the extant political organization, an informal club that Walter and his proteges had first convened fifteen years earlier to coordinate their initial forays into Washington. The decidedly less high-minded name was an acronym of its closely held mission statement: Never accommodate stupid congressmen and regulators.

“Why me?” I asked.

“Senator Simpson is going to be in. His handler, Clifford White, called today and asked if you could join. The senator has some new thoughts on energy policy.”

Simpson was tipped as an early favorite for the Republican presidential nomination. It surprised me that he’d break bread with Walter and his cronies in the current political climate, but a moment’s reflection led me to wonder whether it mightn’t be a shrewd move. The newspapers would likely be vilifying someone else by the time the election rolled around, and the big money for national campaigns always came from Wall Street.

“Any other guests?” I asked.

“Nikolay Narimanov. White invited him as well.”

Narimanov’s name was more of an enticement to me than Simpson’s. The wealthiest and most successful of the Russian oligarchs who’d risen from the ashes of the Soviet Union, Narimanov had built an energy empire that spanned the globe. I’d been following his companies for years, but I’d never met him.

“That’s kind of unusual, isn’t it?”

“I’m just the messenger boy. Yes or no?”

Meeting Narimanov wasn’t an opportunity to pass up.

“Yes.”

“Okay, then.”

We sat in silence while Alex drank some more. The clown clock struck the hour overhead, hands spinning rapidly in opposite directions. Alex suddenly lurched toward me, spilling vodka onto the table.

“Tell me,” he pleaded, voice thick. “How do you do it?”

“Do what?” I asked, realizing he was about to cry.

“Not despair.”

I laid one hand on his as a tear trickled down the side of his face. After Kyle disappeared, I’d had panic attacks, bouts of crushing chest pain that dropped me to my knees and left me gasping for air. It had taken three separate cardiologists to persuade me that there was nothing physically wrong. The severity of the attacks had lessened through time, but I still felt the tightening in my chest when I got overloaded with work or family stuff.

“Everyone despairs. Trust me. What’s important is to find a reason to keep going. A job you enjoy, or a girl. A family…”

“You had something special. It doesn’t work out for everyone that way.”

I half closed my eyes, waiting a moment for the emotional pain of the thrust to dissipate. It was true. Claire and I had had something special, with each other and with the kids. Alex was the product of a bitter divorce, one that had left him and his mother estranged from his father and laid the groundwork for his obsession. I took a deep breath and plunged on.

“Sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn’t. But it makes me sick to see you beating yourself up because you think you’re letting Walter down. You’re his son. You shouldn’t have to grovel for his affection.”

Alex rubbed his hairline again, nodded without meeting my eye, and threw back the rest of his vodka.

“You’re right,” he slurred. “I’m his son.” He got up, almost overturning the table. “I have to go now.”

“Back to the office?” I asked apprehensively.

“No.” He flapped one hand at me vaguely. “I have to be somewhere. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I trailed a few feet behind as he staggered out the door and flagged a taxi. He fell into the rear seat and slumped sideways as it drove away. Rubbing the back of my neck with one hand, I realized my underarms were damp with sweat. I hadn’t known he was drinking this heavily. The barman stared silently as I approached.

“How much do I owe you?”

“He has a tab.”

It figured. I dropped a ten on the counter for my beer anyway.

“How often does he get like that?”

The barman shrugged, perhaps reluctant to talk about a valued customer.

“Maybe you should consider cutting him off.”

“Maybe,” the barman replied. “But he’d only go someplace else. And I’m not the one making him unhappy. You ever think about that?”