Back at my desk, as I plugged the last numbers into the model, I felt a hot flush spread under my collar. I shouldn’t have questioned Michael like that. In all my research, I’d never seen a scenario in which the trade barriers had been dropped completely. But he was the boss after all. Maybe I hadn’t looked hard enough.
After the model was finished, I checked everything over slowly. The papers were still warm in my hands when I walked over to Michael’s office, a stupid-big grin stuck to my face. Assuming we took even a conservative position on WestCorp, the money we stood to make was staggering. I had to read it twice, three times to be sure. This kind of good news ought to be delivered in person. When I got there, the door was nearly closed. Michael was on the phone. I almost didn’t recognize him—his voice was strange, different. It quieted. I edged a little closer.
Then Michael spoke again. Another language. It sounded familiar.
Then I remembered: in his usual overly ambitious way, Arthur had decided to take up a new language junior year, even though he already spoke French and Spanish. He stayed up late every night, practicing his tones and inflections. This was the fluent version of those efforts. Michael was speaking Mandarin.
A prickle ran up my spine. Odd. Michael had always asked one of the third-year analysts, a Princeton grad who spoke flawless Mandarin, to translate on conference calls with the Chinese. Michael never spoke on those calls, not once.
It went silent again. I was about to leave the model in the in-box on Wanda’s desk, but I hesitated. I’d e-mail it instead. Better not to have evidence that I’d been hanging around. Overhearing things that I strongly suspected I wasn’t supposed to overhear.
The apartment was dark when I got home. It was early for me, just past eleven, but Julia was already asleep.
I sat on the futon and opened my computer. I found myself typing Michael Casey’s name in the search bar. Strangely, it had never occurred to me before, to do this. I didn’t even know what I was looking for. Maybe an explanation for what I’d overheard. The creepy feeling that I couldn’t shake.
I hit Enter.
The top search results were from Spire’s website, Michael’s official company biography. Undergrad at South Dakota, wildcatting for oil in West Texas for a year, MBA completed in 1983. He started at Spire in 1986. Michael never said anything about working anyplace but Spire. I wondered about that three-year window after his MBA.
I kept clicking through the results. A few pages in, there was a link to an archived article in the New York Times. A profile from the business section, dated 1985. There was a grainy photo on the page. I squinted. It was Michael, twenty-odd years earlier.
I scanned through the article. Michael had worked at another hedge fund called Millworth Capital. In the summer of 1985, he made upwards of $400 million for Millworth, shorting foreign currencies. The profile described his unlikely success: a farm boy, the first in his family to go to college, a rising star on Wall Street at age twenty-six. The reporter asked Michael what he thought he could attribute his success to.
Mr. Casey tilts back in his chair, resting his feet on the desk. There are no traces of his former life in his office: no family pictures, no college diploma.
“I don’t think there’s any one way to answer that question,” he says. “You could point to any number of things. But I think there was a moment when I got hooked on this. My first big trade. I cleared $50 million in one day. I was twenty-four years old. I wasn’t going to look back after that.”
“Evan? Evan? Hello?”
Julia was standing in front of me, hair rumpled and eyes scrunched against the glow of the computer screen. I twitched, my hand slamming the laptop shut. “Oh,” I said. “Hi. I didn’t hear you get up.”
“I said, what are you doing? Work?”
“Uh, just some e-mails. I’m done now.”
She padded over to the kitchen sink, her bare legs sticking out from beneath her T-shirt. She took a glass from the cabinet, turned on the tap, held her finger in the stream of water, waiting for it to get cold. Mundane gestures I’d seen a hundred times before, but at that moment, they felt too private for me to witness. Part of a separate life. I wanted something from Julia that it felt impossible to ask for. A silence different from the one that had grown between us.
“I’m coming to bed,” I said. She waved a hand to show that she’d heard before disappearing into the darkness of the bedroom.
Chapter 6
Julia
I looked up from the donor database I was updating to see Eleanor march into Laurie’s office. Others maintained a certain deference around Laurie, asking me in a whisper if she was available before approaching her door, but not Eleanor. Not this day, not any day. She slammed the door shut behind her, but her voice vibrated through the wall.
“Laurie, I don’t know how you expect me to pull this gala off. Not with this shitty budget. This is pathetic.”
“It’s the best we can do. You know things have been tight around here.”