Son of Destruction - By Kit Reed Page 0,79

in Cambridge – the high school hero was at Harvard and Walker was on scholarship at MIT. Surprise. Tight smiles. Oh, it’s you. He could see Chaplin reassessing him. Grinning, he asked Walker to come back to Eliot House for a drink, but he refused.

In Cambridge, he was a new person. It made him wary of people who knew where he came from. More important: by then he had more important secrets to keep. In Cambridge he and Chaplin never mixed – they never would, but tonight they sat down as equals, although in real life Walker has the edge and Chaplin said as much, coming in. Failure humbled him, Walker thinks over coffee. He has nothing left to lose. When they got down tonight, talking in Walker’s beautifully spare, well-ordered living room, he and Bob Chaplin turned out to have more in common than he knew, because for all those years when Chaplin was being noble, he was in love with Lucy. They have plenty to talk about, but he let Chaplin do the talking.

Skirting certain matters. The ring. What did she do with the ring? The guilt. Where, exactly, that guilt should lie.

The ex-Harvard, ex-golden boy cradled his coffee, careful not to mar the polished teak table Walker designed and had made especially for this house. Grimacing, Chaplin talked about his failure – and not in a twelve-step way, although Walker noted the watery eyes and unsteady smile, the classic recovered-alcoholic’s way of putting things. He laid it to one spectacular mistake at Goldman Sachs, although they both knew his grief was lodged farther back and somewhere much deeper. Fort Jude’s golden boy was in mid-divorce when he messed up at the brokerage, he was fighting tooth-and-claw with Bethany and her lawyers, which skewed his judgment, and that was just before the crash. He jumped too fast on a major I.P.O., it tanked and he cost the firm their biggest client.

‘It’s like falling off a horse,’ Chaplin told him. ‘It shakes your confidence and day after day you have to get up and go out riding, but you’re scared. You seize up and everything you do from then on goes wrong.’

It was only the first in a string of wrong calls that unspooled and ruined him, and that was the end of Bob Chaplin, Goldman Sachs. Now, Walker could have warned the man off that particular transaction. When he isn’t working with the A.I. boys in public and private sectors, Walker Pike codes models of everything from stock market futures to burgeoning world wars. An intuitive coder, he’s a genius at projection.

As he is living his life alone in every sense, it’s what he does for fun. He could have warned Chaplin off that first I.P.O., and that just on the basis of what he has stored on his hard drive, which is only the beginning of what Walker knows. He could have warned Chaplin off a lot of things. He’s never been much of a drinker but Pop was, so he could have warned him never to take a drink just because he felt bad, which is what tipped Chaplin down the chute into blackouts, rehab and the remaining eight yards into A.A.

If life is a race and he used to think of Chaplin as running way ahead, Walker passed him a long, long time ago.

Funny, the fourteen-karat kid from the right side of town told Walker Pike more than he needed to know about his own life and about what went wrong with his marriage, and Chaplin did all that on the way to talking about the last night of houseparties in his drunken last year at Fort Jude High.

Because the mangrove patch at Land’s End was where their separate lives and this conversation had been heading from the beginning, Chaplin doubled back on the matter of that chaotic night at Huntington Beach. It hurts to know that polished failure that he is, Chaplin can tell Walker things he’d never have found out alone, because he shut himself up inside his head and locked all the exits a long, long time ago.

No matter how many models he runs on his powerful machine, Walker Pike was and always will be a terminal outsider.

‘That last night of houseparties,’ Chaplin said, underscoring the difference between them with a rueful, insider’s grin. ‘Oooh, man! You know what that’s like.’

‘No. I don’t.’

‘But you understand. Dude, you’ve gotta remember those parties.’

‘Not so much. Not invited.

‘Shit, everybody’s invited.’

Walker’s voice flattened. ‘Not everybody.’

‘Oh, shit.’

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