There’s a morning in FCI Florence Medium 1 when Alkaitis steps out into the yard and sees a flash of color in the crowd. It’s red, but that’s impossible. Red isn’t allowed here. Not just red, but a red power suit, of the kind he hasn’t seen on a woman since the early nineties, mid-nineties at the latest, fire-engine red with extremely padded shoulders. The woman wearing it seems to move too quickly; in a few steps she has somehow crossed the yard and is standing near him, staring.
“Madame Bertolli,” he says quietly, trying to steady his voice.
“You say something?” a nearby guy asks.
“No, nothing.” Yvette Bertolli obviously isn’t here, because that would be impossible and no one else seems to have noticed her. Nonetheless, here she is. She begins a slow circle of the yard, sometimes flickering slightly. She looks much younger than she was the last time he saw her. This may actually be the same suit she was wearing when he met her for the first time, which would’ve been, what, 1986, ’87? A lunch in Paris. She’d just started her own investment advisory business and she had a few high-net-worth French and Italian clients for him. On the morning of Alkaitis’s arrest, her clients had a combined total of $320 million of their money in the Ponzi. Yvette Bertolli died of a heart attack that afternoon.
Now she circles the yard, glancing every so often at Alkaitis. He closes his eyes, pinches himself, every trick he can think of, but she’s still there when he goes inside an hour later, conferring with Faisal under a tree.
“I’d like to ask about your employees,” the journalist Julie Freeman says on one of her visits.
“They were good people,” he says. “Loyal.”
“It’s interesting that you think of them as good people, when they were involved in the crime.”
“No, I did all of that on my own.” He has decided to stick with this story until the end of his life, even though three of his five asset management staffers have been convicted. He detects a flicker of irritation as she makes a note.
“I assume you heard that Lenny Xavier lost his appeal,” she says. “Guilty on nine counts, all involving the Ponzi.”
“I’d prefer not to talk about him,” Alkaitis says.
“Let’s switch tracks, then. I’d like to ask you about something one of your staffers said on the stand,” she says. “When Oskar Novak was cross-examined, he was asked about the search history on his computer, and he said, and I quote, ‘It’s possible to both know and not know something.’ ”
“Why, what was his search history?” Alkaitis hasn’t actually spent much time thinking about Oskar or any of the others. He carried them for years. They could’ve quit at any time.
“He spent a combined total of nine and a half hours researching residency requirements for countries that don’t have extradition treaties with the United States,” Freeman says.
“Ouch. Poor kid.” In his mind, Oskar is still the nineteen-year-old college dropout in a too-big suit at his job interview. “That can’t have gone well for him.”
“It didn’t.” She waits a beat or two, but he doesn’t ask. The truth is, he doesn’t really care what happened to Oskar, which prison he ended up at or the length of his sentence. “Anyway,” she says, “I was curious about whether that idea has any relevance for you, that notion that a person can know and not know something at the same time.”
“It’s an interesting idea, Julie. I’ll think about it.”
There’s something in it, he decides later, standing in line for dinner. It’s possible to know you’re a criminal, a liar, a man of weak moral character, and yet not know it, in the sense of feeling that your punishment is somehow undeserved, that despite the cold facts you’re deserving of warmth and some kind of special treatment. You can know that you’re guilty of an enormous crime, that you stole an immense amount of money from multiple people and that this caused destitution for some of them and suicide for others, you can know all of this and yet still somehow feel you’ve been wronged when your judgment arrives.
Between Freeman’s visits, Alkaitis finds himself dwelling on Oskar’s search history. It’s kind of poignant, actually, thinking of the kid running Internet searches on countries without extradition treaties, research for a project he lacks the guts to carry out. Not like Enrico, who remains at large.
He’s in line for the commissary when he sees Olivia. She’s wandering around, touching various items on the shelves, not looking at him. She’s wearing a blue dress that he remembers from that last summer before he went to prison; she wore this dress on the yacht. He backs away and leaves without buying anything, deeply shaken. He goes back to his cell and lies down with an arm over his eyes. Hazelton is somewhere else, thank god. He’s desperate to be alone, but the problem is that now he can no longer be sure of whether he’s alone in any given room. Certain borders are dissolving.
“Can I ask you to look someone up for me?” he asks Julie Freeman on her next visit. Two days have passed since he saw Olivia in the commissary. “One of the investors was an old friend of mine, a painter who’d also known my brother. Her name was Olivia Collins. I wondered if you could just do a search and see what became of her.”
When he sees Freeman again, two weeks later, he knows what she’s going to say before she says it. “I have some bad news,” she tells him when she sits down. “That woman you asked me to look up, Olivia Collins. She died last month.”
“Oh,” he says. But he already knew this, he realizes. He’s seen Olivia twice now, once in the commissary and once in the yard, where she was engaged in conversation with Yvette Bertolli.
“I’m sorry,” Freeman says, and launches into her questions.
“Can I ask you something?” he asks a little later, interrupting a line of tedious questioning about account statements.
“Go ahead.”
“Why do you want to write about all this?”
“I’ve always had an interest in mass delusion,” she says. “My senior thesis was about a cult in Texas.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“Well, look at it this way. I believe we’re in agreement that it should have been obvious to any sophisticated investor that you were running a fraudulent scheme.”
“I’ve always maintained that,” Alkaitis says.
“So in order for your scheme to succeed for as long as it did, a great many people had to believe in a story that didn’t actually make sense. But everyone was making money, so no one cared, except Ella Kaspersky.”
“People believe in all kinds of things,” he said. “Just because it’s a delusion doesn’t mean it can’t make real money for people. You want to talk about mass delusions, I know a lot of guys who got rich off of subprime mortgages.”
“Is it fair to call you the embodiment of the era, do you think?”
“That seems a little harsh, Julie. I didn’t cause a global economic meltdown. I was as much a victim of the economic collapse as anyone. By the time Lehman Brothers folded, I knew I couldn’t keep it going much longer.”
“I’d like to ask you about Ella Kaspersky,” Freeman says.
“Not my favorite person in the world.”
“Do you remember your first meeting with her?”
He met Kaspersky in 1999, at the Hotel Caiette. The trip was ill-starred from the beginning. Suzanne was sick by then and had stayed home in New York, and by the time he arrived at the hotel he was already regretting going out there and thinking about cutting the trip short. But he needed investors, so he’d been spending a week of every month away from New York City, trawling club drawing rooms and hotel bars. He liked the Hotel Caiette in particular, because the fact that he owned the property lent instant credibility: Look, here we are having a conversation under a roof that I own. Not that he played any role whatsoever in the management of the place, but that wasn’t important.
On that visit to the Hotel Caiette he came downstairs on his second evening and there was Ella Kaspersky, an elegant woman in early middle age, drinking whiskey in an armchair and gazing out at the twilight luminescence of the inlet, the reflection of the lobby rising to the surface of the glass. Alkaitis positioned himself nearby, nodded when she glanced at him. What did they talk about? Italy, if he remembers correctly. She was an art collector. She didn’t work. She traveled, she studied languages, she went to auctions and art fairs. She’d just spent three months studying Italian in Rome, and so they went off together on an extended tangent about the pleasures of Italy before the conversation turned to what he did for a living. She was interested. It emerged quite naturally that she had money to invest; her father, who’d died only a few months earlier, had bequeathed most of his fortune to their family’s charitable foundation, and Ella was involved in the foundation’s investment decisions.
“Tell me about your investment strategy,” she said.
He went into it in some detail. He told her he was using the split-strike conversion strategy, which involved buying a collection of stocks along with option contracts to sell those stocks at a set price later, thus minimizing risk. He timed these purchases according to fluctuations in the market, he told her, sometimes pulling out of the market altogether to invest his clients’ money in government-backed securities, U.S. Treasury bills and such, reentering the market when the time seemed right. She gave the impression of listening intently, but she was at least three drinks in by then and he wouldn’t have guessed that she’d retained everything he’d said, until a letter arrived at his New York office a few weeks later. She’d done some research on his trading strategy and methods. She’d analyzed the performance of a fund that he managed. She’d spoken with two experts on the investment strategy he claimed to be using, neither of whom could explain to her how Alkaitis’s returns were so high and so smooth; she was aware of two mutual funds who employed the same strategy, but their returns were much more volatile than his. She was puzzled by his ability to trade stocks in such quantities without affecting the stock prices. His returns would seem to require an almost psychic knowledge of when the market was going to fall. “I don’t wish to imply,” she wrote, “that I’m entirely closed to the possibility of mystery in the universe, or that I’m unprepared to accept the existence of unusual talent, even outright genius, when it comes to predicting the movement of markets, and yet one can’t help but note that your trading strategy, as practiced at the scale at which you seem to practice it, would require more OEX put options than actually exist on the Chicago Board Options Exchange.” On a personal note, perhaps he could understand her horror when she made inquiries and discovered that her family’s private foundation—which, she wasn’t sure if she’d mentioned this in Caiette, had been founded for the purpose of funding research into colon cancer, which had killed her mother a decade ago—was already heavily invested in Alkaitis’s fund. “Naturally,” she wrote, “I took the matter to the foundation’s director, who shared my alarm and immediately sent you a withdrawal request. Thus disaster was averted, but it is personally appalling to me to consider how close my family’s foundation came to being wiped out. How terrible to think of my parents’ legacy having been so imperiled.” She’d taken the liberty of forwarding a copy of her letter to the SEC.
Alkaitis called Enrico into his office. It was interesting to observe Enrico as he read Kaspersky’s letter; his face didn’t change, but his hands shook a little. He sighed as he handed it back.
“She can’t prove any of this,” Enrico said. “It’s innuendo and speculation.”
“She sent this to the SEC. They could walk in at any minute.”
“We’ll jump off that bridge when we come to it, boss.” Something that occurs to Alkaitis only much later, a few years into his new life at FCI Florence Medium 1: Why didn’t Enrico leave then? In the winter of 1999, with Ella Kaspersky’s having figured it out?
In any event, in the version of history that he gives to Julie Freeman in the prison interview, he shows Kaspersky’s letter to no one.
“So what happened next?” Freeman asks.
“We got a letter from the SEC. They were opening an investigation.”
“Why didn’t they catch you?”
“I don’t know, to be honest. They were incompetent or they didn’t care, or both. I assumed they’d catch us. All it would’ve taken was a phone call. Literally one phone call, and they could’ve confirmed there were no trades taking place.”
“And by ‘us,’ you mean you and your staff.”
“What?”
“ ‘I assumed they’d catch us,’ you said.”
“I misspoke. I meant me.”
“I see. Must have been something of a pleasant shock, when they closed the investigation without catching you.”
“Very much so.”
“Did you see her again?”
“Kaspersky? No.”
Yes, but it isn’t an evening he likes to think about. He and Suzanne were eating dinner at Le Veau d’Or, a restaurant they both loved. Well, he was eating dinner, at any rate. Suzanne was sipping chicken broth. They’d just been to see the oncologist and it was as though they’d entered a tunnel that ended in darkness. They were being transported at high speed toward night. Alkaitis was trying to keep up his end of the conversation but Suzanne was in a different tunnel, an even darker one, she was answering in monosyllables and he could already see how they would be divided from now on, how Suzanne would be carried more and more rapidly away from him. He’d thought the evening couldn’t possibly get any worse, but any given evening can always get worse. A few tables away he heard breaking glass, and when he turned to look, he saw Ella Kaspersky. She was dining alone. A busboy had dropped her wineglass and it had shattered on a bread plate.
“You know her?” Suzanne asked, seeing something in his expression.
“You’re not going to believe this, but that’s Ella Kaspersky.”
(A difference between life with Suzanne and life with Vincent, one of many: he told Suzanne everything.)
“I didn’t think she’d be elegant.” Kaspersky didn’t glance in their direction. She was engaged in dabbing white wine from her lapel. “All this time, I was picturing her as some kind of disheveled crank.”
“Are you going to eat any more?” He wanted his wife to eat something, to keep her strength up, and also very much wanted her to stop staring at Kaspersky.
“No, let’s get the check.”
He got the check and attended to the details while his wife studied Kaspersky, who’d waved off the busboy’s apologies and had returned to reading some kind of document, an inch of paper held together with a binder clip. He didn’t like the way Suzanne was looking at her.
“Let’s just leave,” he said softly, when the check was taken care of, but Kaspersky was seated at the restaurant’s narrowest point, and they had to walk quite close to her table to get to the door. As they neared the table, Suzanne’s face was set in a terrifying smile. Kaspersky finally looked up when they were almost upon her. She had an excellent poker face, except that her eyes narrowed slightly when she recognized him.
“Good evening, Ella,” Alkaitis said. The SEC had closed the investigation earlier that week. There was no need to be ungenerous in victory.