Part 6 (2/2)

A silence.

”I know, I know,” Devon said. ”The less I know, the better.” Adam sounded like he was in a taxi. ”So what shall we talk about, then? How's the family?”

Adam laughed, not unkindly. ”They're good, thanks. Listen, you know we shouldn't stay on any longer than we have to. I'm sure a single guy like you has got plans, anyway.”

”Mos def. I have a date.”

”My man,” Adam said. ”Enjoy.” He hung up. He was so f.u.c.king cool all the time. In one way it would have made Devon feel better to hear, even just once, a little panic in his voice, but in other ways it would have made him feel infinitely worse. It was like high school all over again with that guy. He was one of those alphas, master of every situation, receiver of every gift, one of those guys you made merciless fun of until the day he actually brought you inside the circle and then you turned into a simpering little b.i.t.c.h. They saw each other very rarely-maybe three or four times in the last year-but in the aftermath Devon always felt humiliated by how slavishly he had said yes to everything.

He put the phone down on the dresser and went back to the screen, but Kasey was in the bathroom; there were cameras in there too, of course, but he scowled and went to the kitchen to see if there was anything to eat. Some people were into some perverse s.h.i.+t.

They'd brought in a couple of other people-they'd had to, to keep things sufficiently spread out-friends of his from the old boiler-room days on Long Island who now worked at more legit houses. They'd set up accounts for one another's aunts, cousins, whatever they could get doc.u.mentation for, and siphoned the trades through there. To most of these guys Devon himself was the ringleader, the mastermind, though without a tip to act on, of course, they were all nothing but a group of enlisted men with a willingness to get ahead. His stomach felt like s.h.i.+t again. Maybe because he hadn't eaten anything, but that, he was reminded as he opened and closed the freezer a couple more times, was only because there was f.u.c.k all to eat around here. He took the bottle of pear vodka out of the freezer instead, and in the cabinet it turned out there was still half a bag of salt-and-vinegar potato chips. Presto. Dinner.

He poured himself some vodka and sat down in front of the computer. Kasey was sitting at the kitchen table writing something-paying bills, maybe?-but at least she had her pants off now, which was promising. His own apartment had a pretty Spartan look to it, which was to say that it had a couch and a flat-screen TV that were both huge and expensive, and a rug that was huge and not expensive, and that was it. Nothing on the walls. He'd bought some kind of print of the Golden Gate Bridge and hung it on the wall over the couch, but he just felt stupid and pretentious looking at it-like, do I actually give a f.u.c.k about the Golden Gate Bridge?-and he took it down. In the bedroom was a bed and a dresser and a closet, and underneath a ceiling panel in the closet was a gym bag with about a hundred and sixty thousand dollars in it. This, Devon felt, was the true source of his stomach problems, though he also wondered if that was just dramatic nonsense, if his stomach would quiet down if he ate the occasional well-balanced meal and generally just took a little better care of himself.

He went back to the kitchen to throw out the chip bag and returned with the pear-vodka bottle. The stuff tasted like Jolly Ranchers after a while. Why did he have to get stuck with all the grunt work? The money was pretty much its own answer, even though the more he made, the harder it got to figure out how to spend it, or even where to put it, without attracting attention. Jesus, just one good b.l.o.w.j.o.b would go such a long way right now, he thought. There was an outcall service just a few blocks away; he had it on speed dial. He called them up and asked if Teresa was available tonight, just so he could clear his mind of the whole thing. f.u.c.k Bantex, until tomorrow anyway. It was all that paranoia about being watched that was making him feel sick all the time. He bet the rest of them felt sick too. But no one is watching, he thought as he logged off of Kasey and put the bottle back in the freezer and picked some laundry up off the floor. He was the one doing all the watching. That's what you paid for. I see you, but you don't see me.

t.i.tles were considered unimportant at Perini but a natural hierarchy evolved and was respected. Sanford's reliance on Adam made him the de facto number two; he spent more of his time out of the office now wooing investors in the fund, drinking with them, charming them, impressing them, seducing them into confidence even after the rare misstep or during the always-brief lean times. Precisely the kind of thing Sanford himself used to do all day long-and still did, though he had less of a taste for it now, and also seemed to recognize that youth itself was part of the package that investors wanted to be sold. Sanford himself didn't really look any older, just more dissolute, a little puffier and less put together.

No one else there begrudged Adam the boss's favor; it was a measure of their comfort with it that they made jokes about San-ford's obvious late-stage conversion to h.o.m.os.e.xuality at every opportunity. Every job but Adam's and Bill Brennan's had turned over at least once since Adam had arrived there; Parker had finally been belittled into quitting almost three years ago, and since he'd stopped coming to basketball, Adam had no idea what had become of him. The office's basic fraternal atmosphere was unchanged. Most of them were younger than Adam now, but he could still outrun them and outlift them and outdrink them and while they honored his status as their superior, in every important way he fit right in. Still, there was of course something momentous about his very presence in that office that none of them even suspected, and their not knowing sharpened the borderline Adam prized between his own character and theirs.

Friday afternoons at work tended to devolve into a head start on the younger employees' bachelor weekends, with beer and foosball tournaments and a general disengagement from their adrenalized professional selves; usually the last hour of work was turned over to discussions of why the bar they went to last Friday sucked and which one they should try tonight instead, but on one particular spring afternoon they managed to talk Adam into coming with them to some catered event they knew about that was taking place inside the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. A fund-raiser for something or other. Brennan had tickets and they all wanted Adam's company so badly that they even offered to pay for him. ”I cannot get too hammered,” Adam said. ”Tomorrow's my son's birthday.” Something else to drink to. They took over one of the round tables on the bare stage and there they met their waitress, whose name was Gretchen. Gretchen was provocatively tattooed and reluctantly conceded that she was an actress and would not tell them her age, which led to a general consensus that she was no more than twenty-two.

”G.o.d, I love me some of that hipster p.u.s.s.y,” Brennan said.

”Because they hate you. That's why.”

”Yes,” he said. ”Yes. Because she hates me. That is precisely why.”

They kept ordering more drinks so that Gretchen would have to return to their table, and each time she stopped there they did a clumsier job of chatting her up. They thought their own artlessness was hilarious. Gretchen knew better than to flirt back, but she was enough of a pro, Adam saw, not to let her contempt for these guys show either. The tips were becoming outrageous.

Somehow a serious betting pool took shape around the question of whether Gretchen's tongue was pierced. She came back with a round of Maker's for everyone but Adam. It impressed him that she wasn't a little frightened of them by now. ”Gretchen,” Brennan said earnestly, ”I don't want this to come out wrong, but if you open wide and say Aaah, you will make me a rich man.”

”You gentlemen have a good night,” Gretchen said, smiling. She cleared the last of their gla.s.ses and walked away. A few minutes later Adam stood up to go home, prompting a wave of questions about the staunchness of his heteros.e.xuality. Instead of heading out the theater gate, though, he turned and went underneath the grandstand, where the kitchen and bar setups were, and when he found her, she rolled her eyes and smiled.

”Pay no attention to me,” he said. ”I'm counting your tattoos.”

”Well, you won't get an accurate count,” she said.

”I'm a very busy man. I have to get back to the table soon because I'm in charge of the centerpieces. We're planting them in the Sheep Meadow. So I just need your phone number and I'll be on my way.”

She turned and looked at him, her head at an inquisitive angle, and he could tell she was amused not by anything he'd said but by something else about him. ”How drunk are you?” she said.

”Not at all. I just have to see you again. I don't want to live in a world where women like you are never seen again.”

She stared at him as the bartender loaded up her tray. ”Oh, this,” he said, grabbing his ring finger, ”this comes right off.”

She laughed. ”Leave it on,” she said. ”I like married guys. Keeps things on a basic level. You're happily married, am I right?”

”Extremely,” he said.

She pulled his hand toward her and wrote a phone number on it. ”Wow,” Adam said. ”What a world.”

The sun set in front of him as he walked west out of the park, the long shadows behind him gradually merging into nothing. He took his time; it was probably one of the five most beautiful nights of the year. In the rare moments when he stepped back and thought about it at all, it was vital to Adam's conception of his professional life that he wasn't stealing from anybody. There was nothing zero-sum about the world of capital investment: you created wealth where there was no wealth before, and if you did it well enough there was no end to it. What Adam did was just an initiative based on that idea, an unusually bold manifestation of it. Why should he be restricted-or, worse, restrict himself-from finding a way to act on what he was enterprising enough to know and to synthesize? It took leaders.h.i.+p skills as well, because you couldn't pull off something like this by yourself even if you wanted to. In order to minimize the risk he had to command the total trust and loyalty of Devon and the handful of his friends he'd brought in on it from brokerages around the city. And that he had done. Devon had turned out to be a young man p.r.o.ne to anxiety but whenever he seemed close to the point of bailing, five minutes together was enough for Adam to rea.s.sure him they still had the whole thing safely in hand.

It wasn't even his chief source of income, at least not anymore. His compensation at Perini had soared, and deservedly so. This was more in the nature of a self-administered bonus. In the course of his work he learned some things about a given company, things not of a public nature; based on this information he gave Devon an instruction on the buying or the selling of that company's stock, spread out through about thirty small accounts with dummy names managed by Devon and the others; each account transferred its profits to different offsh.o.r.e banks, all of which then sent the money, in slow increments, to the Royal National Bank of Anguilla, where oversight policies were business-friendly. Adam's share in the last year was less than half a million. It was a nice margin to have, certainly, and every little bit added to the range of possibilities in his family's lives. But they didn't depend on it. He could have ended the whole scheme at any time and, in terms of their daily lives, they very likely wouldn't feel the money's absence at all.

But it wasn't just about the money, in any case. More than the money, which had to be spent with some care, it was about exercising that ability to repurpose information those around him were too timid or shortsighted to know what to do with: the night two weeks ago, for instance, when he and Brennan had sat there in the office having a Scotch after working late and had shared a laugh about Brennan's former frat brother who worked at Bantex, who had just called him up scared s.h.i.+tless because his entire office had just been served with grand jury subpoenas. That was what kept the whole scheme fresh at this point, that was its engine and its reward: the sense of living in two realms at once, one that was visible to others and one that was not. Every day he looked right into Sanford's face and confirmed with wonder that the old man was so blinded by affection that he didn't even see him.

Inside an empty playground Adam found a water fountain and washed the ink off his hands. He made no effort to memorize the phone number first; he hadn't even glanced at it. It wasn't the first time he'd done something like this. He'd never cheated on Cynthia and never would, because that would be weak and stupid, and the risk so much greater than the reward. But sometimes there was a thrill in walking right up to that line, and in charming the other person into stepping over it. He figured it was probably all downhill after that moment anyway.

He turned left at 77th and from that angle he could see the windows of their home high above him as he approached; the only ones lit were downstairs on the kids' floor. He took the elevator all the way up and walked into the moonlit living room. There was no note for him anywhere but he was pretty sure Cyn had told him where she had to be tonight and he'd just forgotten. The curtains blew toward him where the patio door had been left open. There was always TV but right now Adam just felt like talking to somebody; if he'd known he was returning to an empty home, he might have stayed out. He dropped his jacket on the couch and took the interior staircase, which was behind the kitchen, down to the second floor. All the doors were closed, as always, but there was some kind of noise escaping from Jonas's room. He knocked; no answer came, but the noise didn't stop either, so he knocked again and walked in. There were boxes and packing material all over the floor, and on top of Jonas's dresser, incredibly, was a turntable with a vinyl record spinning on it. Adam couldn't remember the last time he'd even seen one. Jonas, who had his headphones on, swung his feet down from his desk and smiled.

Adam pointed at the record player and then held his palms up to mime confusion. Jonas took the headphones off. ”Mom and I decided to celebrate my birthday early,” he said. ”Isn't it beautiful? Thanks, by the way.”

Adam, laughing, shook his head. There were two chairs in his son's room and they were both filled with LPs in their covers, probably forty or fifty of them, none of which had been there the day before.

”The sound just doesn't compare,” Jonas said. ”It's so warm. I can never go back to digital after this.”

Adam walked over to the still-spinning turntable and saw what was playing: the Buzzc.o.c.ks. ”April home?” he said. ”I saw her lights on.”

”Her lights are always on. She's out somewhere. She's the Queen of the Night.”

Adam flipped through the record pile. There was a fair amount of music he recognized, which was itself a little perplexing. The greatness of The Clash was indisputable, he supposed, but were kids Jonas's age really still listening to it? Wasn't that the whole point of music-that you had your own? For Adam, music was tied to time: most ineffably it served as the soundtrack to high school and college. Beyond that he had never given it a lot of thought. The names in the pile began to get even older and more obscure: Television, Fairport Convention, Phil Ochs, the Stanley Brothers.

”And how about you?” he said. ”It being a Friday night. Any plans? A date, maybe?”

Jonas rolled his eyes. ”Yeah, we've all got big dates,” he said. ”And then there's the church social, and then we're all going to the soda fountain for a cherry phosphate.”

Cynthia worried lately that Adam and Jonas weren't as close as they used to be, and while Adam didn't know about that-was it even healthy for a teenage son to be all that close to his father?-it was true that they were growing conspicuously unlike each other. At the same time, there was a kind of Spartan streak in his son that Adam recognized and respected. He'd gone vegan, for instance, which, even though it was not something Adam would have done in a million years, was certainly a form of discipline in the interests of the body. Still, having spent his own high school years as a virtual president of the mainstream, he couldn't help but find Jonas's taste for exile a little hard to understand.

He moved one pile of records from a chair to the floor and sat down. ”So, punk,” he said. ”That was before my time, even. I didn't know you were interested in that.” His son nodded, like some sort of scholar, less a nod of agreement than a nod to indicate that it was a worthy question. ”That was probably the last really genuine thing to happen in pop music,” Jonas said. ”It was exciting while it lasted, though, which was about five minutes.”

”But people your age still listen to it?”

”People my age,” Jonas said, ”are mostly morons.”

”Wait a minute, though. Aren't you in a band? The band is still together, right? I a.s.sume you're not playing old s.e.x Pistols songs?”

”That is kind of a sore subject right now,” Jonas said.

Adam held up his hand to indicate that they would speak of it no more. He picked up an alb.u.m by Flatt & Scruggs; he didn't know the first thing about them but for some reason, gazing at their suits and crew cuts and formal smiles, he was struck by a kind of pity for them, because they were so dead. ”There wasn't a lot of music in our house growing up,” he said. ”The stereo was like a battlefield. Your uncle Conrad and I kept breaking the rules-mostly about volume; I think the rule was no higher than four-and then the ban would come, no more music in the house for a day, a week, two weeks. We couldn't help it. We'd hear something on the radio, and when it got to the point where you couldn't stand waiting a few hours for it to come on again, we'd go out and buy it at Walgreens or someplace, and if it was any good obviously we'd turn it up. Then we'd forget to turn it back down, and a day later Dad would flip on the radio to hear Paul Harvey, and it would come on at ear-splitting volume.”

Jonas nodded as if this story served to confirm something he'd known all along. ”Music sucks now,” he said. ”It all comes out of a factory. It's not about anything except wanting to be famous. How people can even listen to it is beyond me.”

Adolescence was all about overstatement; still, it made Adam sad to hear his son talking this way. ”Well, cheer up,” he said. ”Maybe punk is poised for a comeback.”

<script>