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.”
4
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.”
5
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