This Is How It Really Sounds (31 page)

“A squash racket did that?”

“A titanium squash racket. Titanium. That's the stuff they make missiles out of.” Kell raised his eyebrows. “Anyway, you can see I wasn't bullshitting when I missed the meeting yesterday. How did it go?”

“Very well. David Lau sends his regards.”

Lau was the Chinese point man in their new venture. Kell's vision was to take advantage of financially desperate American states and municipalities by buying up public turnpikes, bridges, and utilities using Chinese capital. These investments would lumber along generating six or seven percent profit each year, but owning a utility wasn't the real play. The real play was in the bonds that could be issued. With each bond sale they would buy more infrastructure, and with more infrastructure they could issue new bonds, gobbling their way across the United States from horizon to glorious horizon, taking a small percentage of each transaction.

Kell spent a few minutes going over the Shenzhen Red Dragon Group and strategizing about where their hundreds of millions of capital best fit. Whatever Kell's off-hours habits, the lawyer was always completely decorous about money. His short stature and firm handshake seemed to anchor a prospective partner as securely as a chain attached to an immovable boulder. Beyond that, he radiated the sort of underdog street smarts that the self-made millionaires of China could relate to. He was the state-school guy who'd never gotten rid of the chip on his shoulder and never joined the club. His financial plays were devious and complex, because he liked complicated games and because he liked the idea of outwitting his “betters” from Wharton and Harvard Law. Kell was the impetus behind this venture. Aside from some capital he'd invested, Peter's part on these deals was primarily decorative: his presence lent a touch of celebrity to the fine office and the well-designed bilingual prospectus. Whatever the undertones of his reputation, Peter Harrington was a man who had made eight hundred million dollars in a very short time, and that was one pedestal that no amount of bad press could knock him off of. Now Kell sat back in his chair and rubbed his chin.

“Where'd you take off to the other night?”

Harrington answered indirectly. “I didn't think you would miss me.”

“I always miss you, buddy!” He shook off the phony sanctimony. “Seriously, we ended up in some karaoke room and I looked up and there was Paul horizontal with his girl, and then this waiter knocks on the door and shows up with about twenty plates of food—”

“Twenty? Who ordered that many plates?”

“Nobody. So Angelina and the other girl are fighting with the waiter, trying to make him understand he has the wrong order. But they're totally wasted, and in the middle of it Paul's girl decides to get sick all over his shoes and then the manager comes in…” He shook his head. “Long story short, they threw us out. But it gets worse. After the girl throws up on his shoes, Paul loses interest in her and starts getting depressed. Why this, why that: what an idiot he'd been—”

“What's up with Paul, anyway?”

Kell looked at him meaningfully. “Goldman Sachs? Are you kidding?”

“I heard a few rumblings.”

“Rumblings? They've already indicted six people from the Special Purpose Vehicles Department. He told me he showed up at work two weeks ago and they were hauling out his computer in a box marked
EVIDENCE
.”

“That's a bad sign.”

“You think so? And this isn't just the SEC; it's the IRS. The fucking IRS! So it's not like you've got a bunch of guys building their résumé. The IRS is a dead-end career track, and they're highly unimaginative about the way they look at numbers.”

“Is he guilty of something?”

Kell shrugged. “Who's innocent? But that's irrelevant. They've got to feed somebody to the mob and it isn't going to be the CEO. So Paul's on the chopping block.”

Peter considered it. There'd been a few investigations since the collapse, but the government always went after them clumsily, their understaffed enforcement departments issuing a string of heroic press releases at the outset and then bogging down in a swamp of motions and documents. Most of what he and Kell had done had taken place in areas where the law was vague or had been eliminated by lobbyists. He liked to joke that there was only one real crime on Wall Street: the crime of being obvious.

Losers like Paul Gutterman, though, who plodded along on a lower plane, were much easier targets, and they could be sacrificed to protect the corporation, like a lizard shedding its tail to escape.

“So what's he doing here?”

“I don't know. Maybe he wanted to get out before they confiscated his passport.”

“Is it that bad?”

“Oh, yeah!”

“Why does he come running to you?”

Kell cast his glance away to the side. “Between us?” He waited until Peter nodded. “He helped me out with information once in a while.”

It was common: some hint of large movements about to happen, or a critical nod, like the microgesture in a poker game that indicated what cards they might be holding. Those sorts of relationships happened all the time. Peter himself had had many of them. They kept a person on top of the game, but they also tended to stray into the illegal. “Is there any chance of you catching what Paul's got?”

“No,” Kell said contemptuously. “They already went over me with a microscope and they couldn't get anything. Believe me, they would have loved to knock me down a peg. I don't do ‘humble' very well.”

“I've noticed.”

They both laughed. “Seriously, where'd you go with Carol—”

“Camille.”

“
Camille,
the other night.”

“We'll get to that. Paul's flown all the way to Shanghai to look you up. What's he asking for?”

“He wants to be in on something.”

“To accrue in value while he's in jail?”

Kell shrugged, and Peter went on. “So that's the favor he's calling in: you put him in on something; he'll keep quiet in front of the grand jury.”

The bull-like lawyer seemed to wince almost imperceptibly; then he sputtered out a warm but discomforting laugh. “You are a cold SOB when you get down to it, aren't you?”

“Well, am I right?”

“Maybe on some level there's a grain of truth, but it's not all like that.”

“What part isn't like that?”

“Look…” Beneath his success, Kell had the underdog's comprehension of disappointment and failure. “Say you're Paul. You're a modest guy. You've spent your life as a midlevel trader, doing what they told you and filling in the blanks that you knew they wanted filled in. You don't get to take the corporate jet to the Caymans or the thousand-dollar lunch at Le Bernardin. You're an underling, even though nobody comes out and says it. But when the shit hits the fan, you go down like an underling, with the CEO throwing his hands in the air and saying,
Oh my, how did that happen?
You've got one of my colleagues billing you seven hundred dollars an hour, and if your savings hold out long enough, he'll get you a guilty plea and a suspended sentence. And that's your life: you thought you'd scrape together a cottage in the Hamptons, not too far from the water, where you and your wife could bicycle down and watch the sunset, and instead you've got no wife, no money, and no career, and the only sunset you're seeing is your own life going over the horizon.”

At that moment Harrington felt his phone vibrating. He took it out and recognized the Long Island area code. It was Paul Gutterman. “You gave him my number?”

“You two are old friends, aren't you?”

The phone kept buzzing, each cycle a fresh accusation. Harrington was relieved when it went to voice mail. “So, what are you doing for him?”

“The Akron sewer system. I'm giving him a small piece as part of a Chinese name I'm incorporating. Technically, he should declare it, but it's very hard to find if he doesn't. He's a footnote to a footnote to an addendum. And besides, there's nothing illegal about it.” Kell shrugged. “I feel sorry for the guy. He's lost everything.” With that, the lawyer changed the subject. “So what about this Camille woman. Who is she?”

“She's my tutor.”

“No shit! And she took you to bed on your first night out? That's a breach of protocol.”

“I didn't say she took me to bed.”

“Get off it, Peter. You were running after her like a puppy.”

Harrington laughed, shaking his head.

“And Nadia's cool with this?”

“Well … I haven't really worked that part out yet.”

Kell laughed. “This is going to be entertaining. What's she like?”

“Interesting. She lives in a garden.”

“Like a gnome?”

“No, a real garden. One of those antique ones, with houses and ponds and miniature trees.”

“How'd she swing that?”

“She's some kind of special tour guide. As I said, she's interesting. There was a party there with artists and art dealers. Actually, we did some Ecstasy. I haven't done that in about ten years.”

“Ecstasy, eh? And she had it?”

Harrington nodded. “I'm not really sure what to make of her.”

“Same as the rest: you're potential rich-husband material, and it's just a matter of how she plays you. They've all got their styles, and the most interesting ones give you the most interesting ride.”

“Yes, I know: in your world every couple is really just a successful financial arrangement.”

“C'mon, don't give me the chump act. You've got, what, eight hundred million in the bank? For her, you're like a giant gold ingot with arms, legs, and a dick sticking out of it.”

Harrington was irritated to hear Kell dragging the magical experience of the other night down to his own level. “For a man who's so sentimental about his business relationships, you're pretty damned businesslike about sentimental ones.”

Kell laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. “I'm just giving you a hard time, buddy. Have fun. Fall in love with the pretty Chinese girl. I'll be the best man at your wedding.”

Harrington turned to him as an afterthought. “You know, I'd like to poke through the old Crossroads database. You've got the most recent one here at the office.”

Kell instantly became curious. “What for?”

“Oh, I just wanted to check out a few investors, see how much they were in for when it blew up.”

“We're not feeling remorseful, are we?”

“No. There's a couple of small investors—distant family, that sort of thing. I've been thinking about, you know, maybe make them whole again. I'm talking about a few hundred thousand dollars. It's not a lot of money, and it will get some of my relatives off my back.”

The lawyer shrugged. “It's your money.”

Kell led him into the spare office and logged him in to the database. “Go crazy on it. We've got to take off in twenty minutes.”

It took him a couple of tries to find Pete Harrington. The singer had invested late in the game, after he himself had sold his share. It was under the name of Jason Kiriakis Financial Services, probably his financial advisor, and the buy-in had been nearly eight million dollars. Now worth about a twentieth of that.

So that's what it had been about: money. Somebody had given him shitty advice on how to make an easy buck in the bond markets, and he'd bet wrong. Same old hypocrite bullshit! They always wanted to make a killing, and when the game went against them, they wanted to dump the blame on someone else. He felt like telling him,
Hey, idiot, I wasn't even in Crossroads when it tanked! I had nothing to do with your financial problems!
Just like all the assholes in New York. Suddenly,
they
were victims, even though the real losers had been the bank, or the pension fund, or the client, or the government, while they themselves got out with their fortunes intact, thank you. Middle-aged crybabies in Brooks Brothers diapers, tattling to the press. He would get to the bottom of this, very quietly and very privately, with no whining, and he'd deal with it.

Kell knocked on the door; then cracked it open. “It's time.”

*   *   *

The restaurant had given them a woody, rice-screened private room and seated the head of the Red Dragon group facing the door, in the position of honor. The two men from Shenzhen spoke perfect English. They were worldly Hong Kong capitalists who had raised office buildings all over China and were looking to diversify their holdings. Mr. Wu and Mr. Lam. Harrington saw a look pass between two of the men when he came into the room. He'd seen it before. Yes, he was
that
Peter Harrington.

They began with the usual talk. One of the Hong Kong men had graduated from Oxford and the London School of Economics. The other was trained as a civil engineer and went back and forth between Hong Kong and Mumbai consulting on infrastructure projects. Both had spent lots of time in the United States and professed their admiration for the country and its people. “So we feel this project might be a good fit for us.”

Kell warmed to this. “Your expertise in infrastructure would be a great asset.”

The Chinese men had sat at tables like this from Hamburg to Dubai, but for all their poise, they seemed strangely ill at ease with him, preferring to direct their questions about regulatory law and utility rates to Kell. When Harrington said something, they would look at him uncomfortably and then quickly shift their attention back to his partner. Maybe it was his own paranoia, but they seemed to be staring at his broken nose. The meeting was floundering: it was polite enough, with all the questions and answers indicative of an incipient partnership, but the real reason for the lunch was to forge the personal bond necessary to business in China, and in that respect it was going badly.