The next morning, as I passed the diner on the corner, I stopped and peered through the window. A TV in the corner showed the crowds at the parade. It looked cozy inside. The jingling bell announced my arrival, and a sullen waitress showed me to a table. “Happy Thanksgiving,” she said, slapping the laminated menu on the table. “You want coffee?”
The coffee was sour and burned, and the eggs were runny, but it didn’t matter. I’d passed the diner every morning, and I’d always wanted to stop there. When the man at the next table departed, he left behind his copy of the New York Observer. I grabbed it, straightening the crinkled pages. There was a story about the war in Iraq, the troops celebrating Thanksgiving in Baghdad and Basra. An item about the Detroit bailouts. At the bottom of the front page was a teaser for a story inside: HEDGE FUNDS DOWN IN 2008
Results show steep drop in earnings across industry. A12
I flipped to page 12. It was Adam McCard’s byline.
“More?” the waitress said, not bothering to wait for a response. She tipped the carafe and let the coffee splash over the sides of the mug.
I skimmed the story. Manhattan, Greenwich, Stamford—everyone was having a bad year. Negative returns, investors yanking their cash, waves of layoffs. Hundreds of funds had shut down already, and more were on the brink of collapse. Sometimes you had a bad year, everyone knew that. But this looked to be something bigger. A bad decade, or more. Even at Spire, money was tight, and there weren’t going to be any bonuses that year. People grumbled, and Roger let slip, bitterly, that he’d been counting on a bonus to make up for the money he’d been wasting on bottle service. But I think most of us knew how good we had it. We still had our jobs. Spire was the one hedge fund in the industry that hadn’t laid off a single person since the downturn.
The WestCorp deal had finally gone live earlier that week, on Monday, a few days before the holiday. Michael had called me into his office that morning. He gestured at me to sit, then he shut the door. He didn’t mention the car ride on Friday night, what had happened, or what we’d discussed. And that was okay—I didn’t need him to explain anything. I finally felt like I got it. Like everything made sense.
“Evan. I realized I never actually thanked you for coming on the Las Vegas trip the other week, on short notice. You were immensely helpful. So thank you.”
“Of course. I was glad to.”
He searched, it seemed, for a crack in my expression, a sign of sarcasm or timidity. Finding none, he reached inside a drawer and withdrew a manila envelope.
“This deal is going to make history. And 2009 is going to be a record-setting year for us because of it. But you probably know that things are tight in the interim. I debated whether I ought to give this to you. But I wanted you to have it as a token of Spire’s appreciation. Of my appreciation.”
He slid the envelope across the desk. “I doubt I need to say this,” Michael said, “but it would be best if you kept this quiet for now.”
After I left his office, I went into a bathroom stall and sat down on the lowered toilet lid. I paused, for a moment, to make sure I was alone. I ripped open the envelope. Inside were several stacks of crisp hundred-dollar bills. I counted them slowly. It took a long time. I counted them again, to be sure.
Twenty thousand dollars in cash. There was no note.
*
I spent Thanksgiving Day at the office. I deleted old e-mails, checked over some models I’d been working on, read a backlog of market reports. I was already impatient for the holiday moratorium to be lifted, for work to resume. Around midday, my cell phone started vibrating. I smiled when I saw the name on the caller ID.
“Arthur!”
“Hey, Evan! Happy Thanksgiving.”
“You too. Jeez, man, I thought you were dead. How are you?”
Arthur was even busier than I was, and I figured my unreturned e-mails and calls were a symptom of that. A funny reversal of roles had happened by the end of college. Freshman year, Arthur lived in my shadow. Physically and metaphorically—being an athlete came with a certain amount of built-in respect. I was the one who knew about the parties on Saturday nights, whose name was recognized by other people. But by senior year, Arthur was the bigger man on campus. He’d grown into himself. He was president of the debate society, elected to Phi Beta Kappa, tapped for one of the elite senior societies. Arthur Ziegler was going places.
The noise of a full household echoed from the other end of the line. I remembered the Thanksgiving I’d spent with him, freshman year, all the cousins and aunts and uncles. The cramped dining-room table groaning under the weight of too many dishes, voices shouting to be heard over the Buckeyes game on TV. Four years had gone by: was that possible? He surely must have noticed the comparative silence coming from my end. It was the first time that day it occurred to me how depressing this must look to someone else. And then he asked: “Hey, so where are you today? Are you up at Julia’s?”
“No, actually—no. I couldn’t get away from work.”
“They don’t even let you have the one day off?”
“It’s been crazy lately. But it’s all right. You know how I feel about her parents.”