A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism (28 page)

She was wearing the black dress that she'd worn to his room the other night, when it had been cinched with a red ribbon. Seeing her there now, punchy and amused, he knew that nothing quite compared to the ego-death of encountering a former lover like that, strutting in all her plumage and on the arm of a far more desirable man. "Gambling too?" he said.

Was she amused by him or angry? He had no clue. Whatever vulnerability he'd accidentally elicited the other night would not be making a return appearance. Never again. For all her many frailties and lousy habits, he could tell she was not a person who suffered the same ignominy twice. True to form, she replied, "But isn't gambling your thing, Gabriel?"

An allusion to the hedge fund, probably; she was dangling the secret, reminding him to keep in line. She wanted to lead in a brisk waltz, showing off for Grayson. Gabriel didn't want to deny her anything, not that night, so he straightened his back and tried to keep up. "Grayson," he said, "I think that's meant to be a double-entendre."

"My antennae picked that much up," Grayson said. His eyes were still fixed on the dealer's hands, the cards, and the felt. He held on eighteen and the dealer hit blackjack, pulled away two more chips. "Fuck me," he muttered. "Right," he sighed. He shook his head at the dealer. "That's me." He turned to face Fiona. "What's the famous Warren Buffett credo about mitigating losses?"

"Mitigating losses?" Fiona thought about it. "Well, I'm sure he doesn't have one—losses aren't really his problem."

Grayson spun around to Gabriel. "What about you? Any wisdom for a losing gambler?"

Gabriel groped through his memory and then said, "'Severities should be dealt out all at once, so that their suddenness may give less offense.' Does that work?"

"It does. And the severities have been dealt with all at once, I guess. That's not Buffett," added Grayson, master of the obvious.

"It's Machiavelli," Fiona said. "Right?" She sent Gabriel a sly look.

He gave her a mischievous grin. "Oh, is that who it is?"

"He's being funny, Grayson," she said. And then, turning to Gabriel, she asked, "But do you know the rest of the quote?"

"'And enjoy your winnings when they come'?" he guessed.

She rolled her eyes. "Yeah, something like that."

"Oh dear!" Grayson groaned, amused. "Am I boxed in by a pair of Machiavellian journalists? This reminds me of a nightmare I had recently!"

"No, no, no," Gabriel said. "Claws are all away." He shot her a look to assure her he meant it. "Now, let's get a drink."

With that, the three of them wandered back to the small bar where Gabriel had been earlier. The bartender lurked nearby, sporting a grave unibrow and a slightly baffled expression, his tremendous bow tie cocked at a steep angle. The place was brownish, in an almost succulent way, and looked like a Chesterfield advertisement from a vintage
Playboy
magazine—except for the fixtures, which fell decidedly short of the promised glamour. Up close the details were scuffed and artlessly distressed. Sepia mirrors reflected a constellation of feeble bulbs. The carpet had been worn down to weedy twine not just by feet but by decades of hot vomit and cold cocktails.

They settled into uncomfortable chairs and Fiona lit up. Gabriel withheld, not wanting to unsettle her by lighting a cigarette himself. She didn't know he'd picked up the habit.

"You play poker?" Grayson said.

"No, no, never." Gabriel shook his head. "I'm a numbers person. I like blackjack."

"Really?" Grayson said, surprised. "You don't seem like a numbers person. You're so—what's the word?"

"Daft?" Gabriel suggested.

"Treacherous?" Fiona offered, ostensibly in jest.

"Alert," Grayson said. "Alert to the human element. So I assumed you'd play poker."

Fiona giggled and Grayson arrived at an expression midway between amused and offended. "Are you laughing at me?" he said.

"No, she's laughing at me," Gabriel explained. "Anyway, even if she were laughing at you, you shouldn't feel too bad about it. She's often amused at the expense of men who sit beside her. It's part of her charm."

From Fiona's look, Gabriel gathered that she hadn't liked that. She no longer wanted to continue playing. Fine. It was hers to direct. She thrust the focus back onto Gabriel. "How's it going with your girlfriend, by the way?"

"She's in Sucre with Evo."

"You're dating one of his staff?" Grayson said.

Gabriel nodded. "His press attaché."

"I met her," Grayson said. "What's her name?"

"Lenka Villarobles."

"Yes. A fascinating woman," Grayson said. "Very beautiful too."

"Yes," Gabriel said. He resisted the temptation to glance at Fiona again. It was best to avoid anything that could be interpreted as gloating.

Fiona was ready to move on anyway. "See, Gabriel?" she said. "It's like I said. In La Paz, everyone knows everyone. There are no secrets."

"Are you keeping secrets, Gabriel?" Grayson said.

Gabriel winked at him. "A few."

"Anything I'd like to know?" Grayson said, quite earnestly.

Gabriel shrugged and checked in with Fiona, not sure how best to proceed.

"He's full of shit," she said and so resolved that question while also diminishing the brief allure Gabriel had summoned for himself.

Grayson just shook his head, mildly confused but still enjoying the show they were putting on. He remained fiercely unflappable, a fountain of jolly curiosity. He was happy to watch, prod with the occasional question. It was, after all, a rough game, and he'd spent enough time playing to know that sitting on the bench was the best position one could hope for.

Fiona was also done sparring. "Let's go," she said to Grayson.

Grayson's glee dangled there as he stared at Gabriel for another moment. He rapped the table with his knuckles. "Well," he said, loitering, unwilling to let the moment go.

Gabriel shrugged, not wanting to step in the way of Fiona's request.

Sensing that Gabriel was deferring to Fiona, Grayson relinquished his interest, thrust out a hand. Gabriel shook it firmly. The eye contact came steady, appreciative. There was something different in Grayson in that moment; something had changed in the way he looked at Gabriel. The expression indicated respect, Gabriel realized, even admiration.

"You should rethink poker," Grayson said. "I think you'd do well."

"Oh, that's funny," Gabriel said, without really smiling. "Isn't it?" he said to Fiona dourly, harshly. He was overplaying and he knew it.

"Okay," she said to Grayson, standing up. "Let's go."

Gabriel watched the two of them walk to the elevators on the far side of the room. He might have stung her at their last meeting, but now it was different—the shame was mutual, it was just some swampy sadness between them, and it favored no one. That she'd somehow managed to care for him spoke not to any quality in him but to the extent that loneliness had perforated her life. He lit a cigarette as she and Grayson approached the elevator bank. He watched her push the button. She was talking. Grayson was lost in an assortment of rising and falling shades of hilarity. At last, Fiona glanced at Gabriel and he raised his cigarette in salute, winked at her. Seeing the cigarette, she smirked, barely, and then turned back to Grayson and continued with whatever she'd been saying. The moment was over. The elevator arrived and the two stepped inside, turned, and faced the open doors. She reached out and pushed the button. For a brief moment, no one did anything.

Then the doors slid shut.

Gabriel got up and went back to the blackjack table. He'd had enough already, but he sat down anyway. He pulled his wallet out and set it on the table, rapped the felt gently with his fingertips, beckoning fresh cards.

IT WOULD BE option number 6, after all. If it hadn't been decided the night before, it had certainly been decided by the time he awoke. It was ludicrous, but he couldn't think of a better way to play it.

He could do option number 5, of course: just invest in the market in a straightforward way, tell Priya what he knew, disseminate the truth. That would be great if things played out well, but it wouldn't help him when and if—and the
if
seemed unduly optimistic—he was fired. Sudden dismissal by Priya, which had seemed a vague danger of the job, now felt imminent, nearly inevitable. It was the golden rule of investing that if you had the time, you had to play for the longer term, where gains compounded. In this case, there was no long term, so he did nothing for himself by nurturing a career that was irrevocably moribund. Accepting that his position at Calloway—and in the lucrative industry itself—would soon be gone, he needed to be especially aggressive in the short run. He had to maximize his winnings at every turn, even if that meant that his moves would be riskier. So went the logic. The deceitful and illegal option was the only option. He did not see another way. More to the point, he saw little to no chance that the plan would backfire.

The plan would go like this:

He would establish a short position, then spread a false rumor, and then, soon after (as soon as the rumor had gained traction, which might take a day or two), he would eliminate his position and begin backtracking. Within as little as twenty-four hours, he'd be telling everyone he knew that he had been mistaken. It had been a simple mistake. If all went according to plan (statement to retraction) the whole thing would be over in two days, at the most.

The SEC wouldn't investigate because the money involved would be too small to raise concerns. Even if they did investigate, they could never mount a case. There would be no evidence. Then there was the question of jurisdiction: Gabriel would be a U.S. citizen in Bolivia circulating a false (and then subsequently true) rumor about a Bolivian political situation that affected a Brazilian company that was owned by a mining firm incorporated in Singapore and run by a Canadian. Crucially, because Gabriel planned to quickly correct his "mistake," it would be impossible to prove that he had intentionally committed fraud. Without testimony from Lenka—which she would never offer, not only because she loved him but also because if she did it would be damning to her too—there would be no way to prove that he hadn't made an honest mistake and then simply corrected it.

In the meantime, Gabriel would ride the price of Santa Cruz. First, he'd ride the price down on a short sale, as the stock price plummeted. Then he'd close that short position at a profit, probably not quite as much as 100 percent, and then put everything toward a long position and ride the price back up. The price would likely spike above its starting point on a so-called short spike, triggered by automated buy orders set up by hedge funds to cover their own short positions. For Gabriel, the trip back up would be where he really cleaned up, doubling or tripling on his already near 100 percent gains. He would aim to sell out within the short spike.

Finally, the price would settle somewhere near, if slightly above, where it currently stood. Even if the timing of his personal trades was somewhat off, he'd come away with gains measured in the hundreds of percents.

Still, he hesitated. Prosecutable or not, it was securities fraud, a serious offense. It was white-collar crime to boot, which had especially unpleasant implications for Gabriel, the son of a liberal firebrand. The dapper uncle of clubfooted larceny, this kind of fraud was the domain of the sweaty and bespectacled accountant who sneaked off to the Caymans with someone's grandma's retirement savings. The mascot of this sleazier side might be Dennis Kozlowski, ex-CEO of Tyco: florid, bald, a complexion of braised poultry. He wore the ill countenance of a Nazi captured by the GIs who'd been trying to pass himself off as a prisoner at the concentration camp he'd been guarding. So Gabriel hesitated. But he couldn't hesitate for long. The shelf life of his information was remarkably short, so if he planned to use it he needed to make his move now. He had to act that day. Indeed, he had to act that morning, before he went to the airport to pick up his mother.

By the time the stock market opened, at nine thirty, he had made himself stop hesitating.

He rode the elevator down to the second floor, entered the business center. He lit a cigarette while the computer booted up and reminded himself that he needed to buy some gum to hide the smell of cigarettes from his mother. Her flight arrived at 3:40 that afternoon.

He tapped the cigarette, blew away the smoke that snaked in his direction. Icons appeared slowly on the screen. Outside, shafts of misty yellow light burst majestically through a carpet of clouds, shooting neat blotches of light onto the bare countryside. Once the computer was fully awake and had connected to the hotel's server, he opened his E-Trade account.

He liquidated 92 percent of his portfolio within five minutes of the opening bell, which left him with a cash balance of $62,017.11. He guessed that if he played it right, he'd be able to turn that balance into something in the area of half a million dollars by the end of the following day. Peanuts to someone like Priya, but to Gabriel, enough to set him up for a while in New York after he was fired. Or, if he wanted to move to Bolivia, say, he could coast for the rest of his life without difficulty. Not that he was thinking, directly, about moving to Bolivia. But the idea had alit somewhere at the back of his mind, where daydreams spawned, and was settling in.

Once he was ready to begin, he felt such a surge of anxiety that he thought he might vomit. His heart, that organ so often anointed with mysterious powers, envisioned as the seat of emotion, was quite clearly nothing other than a knot of muscle embedded in his chest cavity, pumping and sucking blood through a nest of tubes. It did this herky-jerky labor vigorously, steadily. Feeling it that morning, he knew that his blood pressure was up and that his heart was straining with its work.

He picked up his phone and dialed E-Trade. The market had been open for ten minutes. He refreshed his browser and watched Santa Cruz's price dip two cents.

An automated voice asked him to punch in his account number. Next, he was asked to provide his birthday, his Social Security number. He keyed through more questions until he arrived at the options desk. The phone rang twice before someone picked up.