The meeting finally unwound, the room breaking into small groups or rushing away to get to a conference session that had already started. Leon walked out alongside Daniel. “Are you going to the economic outlook panel?” Daniel asked.
“Skipping it, I think. I’ve been up to my neck in economic outlooks for the past four months.”
“Haven’t we all.” The corridor was several degrees colder than the conference room, the wintry chill of Las Vegas air-conditioning. Two young hotel employees were clearing dirty mugs from the coffee and pastry stations. “I’m going to go call my wife,” Daniel said. “Catch up with you at dinner?”
“Looking forward to it.”
It was a pleasure to be away from other people for a moment, with no one making obvious proclamations about economic collapse or pulling him into hysterical conversations about the chartering horizon. Leon poured himself a hazelnut coffee and stepped out into the atrium.
Miranda had left the meeting ahead of him and was sitting some distance away on an industrial sofa, writing something in her legal pad. No, not writing, sketching: the pad was angled away from him, but he watched the movements of her wrist with some interest as he approached. She’d started out at the company as his administrative assistant, which all these years later seemed like a faintly unbelievable rumor. He cleared his throat, and she flipped a page over as she set the pad on the marble coffee table, so that he couldn’t see whatever she’d been working on. He’d seen her perform this motion a hundred times, at least, and as always, he made a point of not asking. Leon held strong opinions about privacy.
“You’re skipping the economic outlook session too,” she said.
“This entire conference is an economic outlook session. I decided coffee was more important.”
“I like your priorities. That’s an interesting idea, by the way, parking ships off the coast of Malaysia.”
“Do you mind if we talk about literally anything other than the economic downturn?” he asked.
“Not at all. I’m thinking about making an excuse and leaving early tomorrow.”
“What, you’re not enjoying the atmosphere of barely suppressed panic?”
“There’s something almost tedious about disaster,” Miranda said. “Don’t you find? I mean, at first it’s all dramatic, ‘Oh my god, the economy’s collapsing, there was a run on my bank so my bank ceased to exist over the weekend and got swallowed up by JPMorgan Chase,’ but then that keeps happening, it just keeps collapsing, week after week, and at a certain point…”
“I know what you mean,” Leon said. “It’s the surprise that bothers me, personally, the way everyone I talk to seems shocked by the downturn in the industry.”
“Yeah, so, true story, one of our colleagues pulled me aside today, I’m not naming names, and he said, ‘I just can’t believe what’s happening to our industry, can you?’ And I’m trying to be patient with these people, I really am, but I had to ask him, which part is surprising to you? Let’s break this down. What is it you can’t believe, exactly? That people don’t want to buy goods when the economy collapses, or that people don’t want to ship goods that nobody’s buying?”
“Predictable outcomes, and all that.” Leon remembered at that moment that his accountant had called earlier and absently checked his phone. She’d called again, ten minutes ago. “Sorry,” he said, “I think I have to call this person.”
“If you don’t see me at dinner, it means I successfully escaped.”
“I’ll be silently cheering you on from the sidelines,” he said as he rose, and wandered away from her, toward the glass atrium wall, toward the phone call that would split his life neatly into a before and an after.
“I’m going to assume you haven’t heard the news,” his accountant said, “or you would’ve called me already.”
“What news? What’s going on?”
“You didn’t hear?”
“Obviously not.” He’d never liked her. Bit of a robot, he remembered Miranda telling him when he’d asked if she could recommend a good accountant, but the best I’ve ever worked with. She sees all the angles. Although what was the point of hiring the best accountant you’ve ever worked with if you’re going to ignore her advice and park all your retirement savings in a single investment fund?
“Leon”—and she didn’t sound like a robot at all, she sounded human and deeply shaken; she was conveying information, he realized just before she told him, that she very much didn’t want to convey—“Alkaitis was arrested this morning.”
“What?” He sank gracelessly into the nearest sofa, staring at an embankment on the other side of the glass, red gravel dotted with cacti under a garishly blue sky. “I’m sorry, did you say—what?”
“It’s all over the news,” she said. “He was a con man. The whole thing was a fraud.”
“The whole…what?”
“It was a con,” the accountant said.
“What do you mean? All the money I invested, you’re saying…?”
“Leon,” she said, “I’m so sorry, but your money wasn’t invested.”
“That isn’t possible. The returns have been excellent, we’ve been living off of them, we—”
“Leon.”
“I don’t understand,” he said. “I just don’t understand what you’re telling me.”
“What I’m telling you is that Alkaitis was running a Ponzi scheme,” she said. “The money you gave him, he didn’t invest it. He stole it. Your account statements were fictional.”
“What does this mean?” he asked, but he knew what it meant.
“Your money’s gone,” she said softly.
“All of it?”
“Leon, it wasn’t real. None of it was real. Those returns…” She didn’t add that I told you seemed almost too good to be true, because she didn’t have to. They both remembered the conversation. How could he have been so stupid? He was staring at the sky, inexplicably out of breath. He didn’t remember hanging up on the accountant, but he must have, because now he was no longer speaking with her, now he was reading a news story on his phone about the arrest of Jonathan Alkaitis at his home in Greenwich that morning, about a Ponzi scheme’s collapsing when one too many investors pulled out, more arrests expected, the SEC and FBI investigating, and somewhere in that morass was Leon’s retirement savings, or rather the ghost of his retirement savings, the savings themselves having been spirited away.
“This isn’t a disaster,” he whispered to himself. Time had skipped again; he was no longer looking at his phone; he was standing by the wall of glass. The economic outlook panel had apparently just broken up, his colleagues spilling out into the corridor and mobbing the coffee stations, a rising tide of overlapping voices. He had to get out. He crossed the plains of gray carpet and floated down the escalator, through the lower atrium and past the casino, out into the thin air of the winter desert. The sidewalk was crowded and the tourists walked in slow motion. Why was a shipping conference being held in a desert city? Because Las Vegas hotel rooms are cheap. Because the desert is a sea. It isn’t a disaster, he told himself, we will not be destitute. He could say he was robbed and that wouldn’t be inaccurate, but on the other hand, these were the facts of the case: he’d met Alkaitis at a hotel bar, Alkaitis had explained the investment strategy, Leon hadn’t understood, and he’d given Alkaitis his retirement savings anyway. He didn’t insist on a detailed explanation. One of our signature flaws as a species: we will risk almost anything to avoid looking stupid. The strategy had seemed to adhere to a certain logic, even if the precise mechanics—puts, calls, options, holds, conversions—swam just outside of his grasp. “Look,” Alkaitis had said, at his warmest and most accommodating, “I could break it all down for you, but I think you understand the gist of it, and at the end of the day, the returns speak for themselves.” It was true, Leon could see it for himself, a steadiness in that column of numbers that appealed to his deepest longing for order in the universe.
A pair of showgirls walked by, eighteen or nineteen years old in matching outfits, holding heavy headdresses of plumed feathers in their hands, their faces set hard with exhaustion and makeup. Not real showgirls, just girls who collected tips for posing with tourists on the sidewalk. He kept passing middle-aged men and women in red T-shirts that read GIRLS TO YOUR ROOM IN 20 MINUTES, handing out flyers that presumably said the same. The people passing out flyers had thousand-yard stares and were worn down in a manner suggestive of a difficult life, or was Leon imagining this? He didn’t think he was imagining it. He stepped into a hotel lobby, he hardly noticed which one, just to get off the sidewalk. He was thinking about the girls: if they could be in your room in twenty minutes, then probably they were already here somewhere, on the Strip, waiting. Picture the hotel suite where the girls are waiting, the air thick with cigarette smoke and perfume, girls staring at their phones, doing lines in the bathroom, talking about whatever it is that twenty-minute girls discuss, waiting, counting hours, counting money, hoping the next date isn’t a psychopath. The vision made him profoundly sad. He could live without retirement savings. No one in this country actually starves to death. It’s just one future slipping away and being replaced by another. He had his health. They could sell the house. He found a padded bench away from other people, near the entrance to the hotel casino, and called his wife.
“I saw the news,” she said before Leon could say hello. The fear in her voice was unbearable. “How bad is it, L?”
“It’s a disaster, Marie.” He realized that he was crying, for the first time in well over a decade. “I’m so sorry, sweetheart, I am just so sorry, it’s an absolute disaster.”
Ella Kaspersky was on CNN that night. Olivia and Leon were both watching, Olivia at her sister’s apartment in New York and Leon in a hotel room in Las Vegas. “Well, of course it occurred to me that the returns could be legitimate, Mark,” she said to the interviewer, “but it’s just that that would make it the first legitimate fund in history whose returns could be graphed on a nearly perfect forty-five-degree angle, so you’ll understand my skepticism.”
Oskar and Joelle were watching too, at a bar in Midtown. They’d comforted themselves over the years by telling themselves that Kaspersky was a marginal figure, but on the other hand, of course she’d always been perfectly correct about the nature of Alkaitis’s asset management unit, and Oskar had read her furious and disconcertingly accurate blog posts.
“There’s no pleasure in having been right,” she said now, elegant and impeccable in a CNN studio. She was telling her story—approached by Alkaitis in a hotel lobby; did her research and concluded that the returns were impossible; contacted the SEC, who bungled the investigation to such an egregious degree that there was talk now of congressional inquiries; tried for years to get the story out and was written off as a crank—and even though Oskar knew all of this to be correct and knew Kaspersky was in the right, he still wanted to throw his shoe at the screen. Why are the righteous so often irritating?
“She couldn’t be happier,” Joelle said. “She loves that she was right.”
In the morning, the investors were back at the Gradia Building. Harvey, who had turned off his phone and spoken to no one, was surprised that people were already in position at seven-thirty, a dozen of them in an anguished knot on the far side of the sidewalk, where they’d apparently been banished by building security. He tried to waft by without making eye contact, but a woman reached out and touched his arm.
“Harvey.”
“Olivia.” He’d met Olivia a few times over the years, in Alkaitis’s office. She wore a white coat and yellow scarf, and in the unrelenting gray of Manhattan in December, she looked like a daffodil.
“You work with him, right?” Another investor was interrupting his vision, a red-faced man with terror in his eyes. “With Alkaitis?”
Harvey stared at Olivia, who stared at Harvey. He wished he could be alone with her, so that he could confess everything without these extraneous people crowding in.
“Harvey,” she said, “is it true? Did you know?”
Another investor had joined them, no, two more, the scene becoming angrier and more crowded, Olivia radiant in her white coat and the others in their New York winter monochromes, black and gray, standing too close with their fear and their coffee breath. Harvey was afraid for his life. They would be entirely justified, he felt, in picking him up and throwing him in front of a passing car. They looked like they wanted to. He was a big man, but they could do it, six of them together. The street was right there.
“I have to go upstairs and see what’s going on,” he said.
“Oh, you’re not going anywhere,” one of them said, “not until you tell us—”
But the last thing they’d expected was for him to bolt like a startled horse, so no one was able to catch him before he darted away. When had he last run? It had been years. He hadn’t realized how fast he could be. He was already across the lobby. He swiped his card and got through the turnstiles while they stood dumbfounded on the sidewalk, staring. He was in terrible shape, though, so now he couldn’t breathe. He’d done something to his ankle—no, both ankles. In prison, Harvey decided, he was going to be one of those men who work out all the time, push-ups in his cell, weights and jogging in the yard. When he arrived on Seventeen, he found that the door to the office suite had been propped open. A police officer was standing by the door. The people in the suite registered, at first, as a mass of undifferentiated shadow: dark suits, dark jackets with FBI or ENFORCEMENT on the back.
There are moments in life that require some courage. Harvey didn’t turn around and walk back to the elevators and take a cab to JFK and leave the country, although at that point he still had possession of his passport. Instead, he walked into the heart of the swarm and introduced himself.
Harvey’s office was populated this morning by agents of both the FBI and the SEC, several of whom were very interested in speaking with him, why don’t you just take a minute to gather yourself and we’ll all take a seat in the conference room.
“I just need to get something out of my desk,” Harvey said.
They offered to get it for him, possibly fearing a hitherto-unnoticed handgun.
“If you look in the top left drawer,” Harvey said, “under the files, you’ll find a legal pad with my handwriting on it. Several pages of writing. I think it’ll be of interest to you.” He floated ahead of them to the conference room.
Oskar passed him on the way in. “What is all this?” he asked, white around the mouth.
“You know what this is,” Harvey said. Oskar looked like he wanted to be sick, but the odd thing was, Harvey didn’t actually feel that bad. None of this felt real to him. Oskar texted Joelle, so she didn’t come in at all. She drove to her kids’ school and signed them out midmorning, took them to F. A. O. Schwarz and told them they could have anything, smiling all the while, but the youngest burst into tears because if they could have anything then obviously something was drastically wrong. Later the children remembered this as a long, uneasy day of trooping around Manhattan in the cold, in and out of toy stores and hot chocolate dispensaries and the Children’s Museum while their mother kept saying “Isn’t this fun?” but also kept tearing up, alternately lavishing them with attention and disappearing into her phone.