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,