When asked to go on record for the woman’s article he said, “Each and every word is ridiculous on all counts and also impossible. Any member of my firm will tell you there’s an iron curtain between my brokerage and my private fund. Those who’ve supposedly ‘reverse engineered’ my methods couldn’t reproduce my profit? Well, let me say this: I sure as heck wouldn’t invest with them.”
But the bitch reporter wanted to hang him. She had ended her smear job by quoting from some supposed investment manager whose client inherited Club-invested assets: “When I called, trying to figure out his game, Pierce would only say, ‘It’s nobody’s business what goes on. It’s a private fund.’ Honestly? It made me uneasy. I couldn’t understand his reasoning on how they were up or down in any given period. In the end, I advised my client to leave.”
After the article, his biggest feeder fund, those Wasp fucks Cook and Baylor, had called with concerns. Charlie’s genius boys had cooked up some perfect design of a supposed “real-time” computer program to assuage them. The Cook and Baylor assholes came in, watched the show, and were convinced—because people were idiots at heart—but by then, rumors had floated to the SEC.
In a stroke of what-the-fuck luck, before the whispers built a head of steam, terrorists had brought down the World Trade Center with two hijacked airliners, flown another jet into the Pentagon, and crashed a fourth plane in a Pennsylvania field. Nobody cared about covering him anymore.
Jake unlocked the door to the Club offices. Laughter greeted him. His staff, these geniuses in charge of keeping the fund afloat, played catch with a huge stack of ledger pages.
“What the hell are you doing?” he asked.
Gita-Rae, the last person he expected to act foolish, tossed the papers to Nanci. Charlie stood smoking, shaking his head at the scene.
“Hold it, boss,” he said. “They’re cooling down the paper.”
“And aging it,” Gita-Rae added. “We can’t give fresh-off-the-computer paper to the SEC.”
“Your office, Charlie.” Jake nodded down the hall with a quick jerk. He was telling, not asking. When they got there, he slammed the door and backed up against the steel file cabinets.
“What the fuck?” Jake, who’d last smoked in 1968, had an urge to bum a cigarette. “Do you think this is some kind of fucking joke?”
Charlie stared with dead eyes. “They’ve been working nonstop for two weeks, including two weekends. They’re just blowing off steam while they age the report. We can hardly give the SEC perfect paper if it’s supposed to be old reports.”
Jake composed himself. “How does it look?”
“Our job is to show them we weren’t front-running, right? Well, we have enough to bury them in proof.”
The previous month, in Jake’s first meeting with the man and woman from the auditing arm of the SEC, he’d asked what it was they were seeking.
“What do you think we’re looking for?” the guy had retorted as though guest starring on Law & Order: Accounting Division.
Jake set the bait. “I assume you’re looking for front-running.” Front-running was this year’s crime du jour, as brokers ran wild using information from their analysis department before sharing the data with clients.
The SEC hound neither confirmed nor denied Jake’s supposition, but his expression told Jake he’d hit the right road.
“I can guarantee you, nothing like that goes on here,” Jake said. “I’d stake my family, my honor, and my bank account on that.”
Which was 100 percent true. Why the fuck would he need to use analysis for trades he never made? Sometimes he wished he were front-running, back-running—anything but juggling billions of pure lies.
? ? ?
The SEC flunkies bought the bullshit, studying the oversized paper as though he’d handed them the Magna Carta. They’d come expecting nefarious schemes, but the idea that the two years’ worth of trading records they requested could be manufactured from whole cloth never made their radar. The Club was the purloined letter of Wall Street. Had they asked for the records from the NASD—the National Association of Securities Dealers—it would be game over.
Jake dripped with sweat under his suit by the time the bald guy and the fat woman left. Minutes after shaking hands and sending them off with cupcakes, joking about bribery by cupcake—ha, ha—he locked himself in his office. He pulled the shades and removed his jacket. As he walked to his large private bathroom, he unbuttoned his shirt with trembling hands.
His teeth chattered from pent-up fear; he was amazed the accountants couldn’t read hidden panic on the nimbus surrounding him. Before getting into the shower, he splashed icy water on his face until it anesthetized his skin. Anxiety pounded through his chest. Every sound became the SEC returning after unearthing some oddity as it reexamined his numbers.
Who the fuck knew what Solomon and Charlie had told Gita-Rae to enter in the bullshit reports. Nanci didn’t exactly have a sharp mind; her fingers were nimble on the keyboard, but not infallible by a long shot.
Jake turned the shower as hot as he could take it, washing sweat out of his hair and then using a rough loofah to scrub at the electric currents of fear flowing through his veins and itching at his skin. Leaning against the glass walls, he broke apart and slid to the tiled floor, his gasps muffled by the pounding hot water.
Once calmed, he closed the taps and stepped out. He’d give up a year of sex for one fucking Xanax.
He wanted out.
Phoebe asked him so often that her words had begun to scrape his soul: “When is enough, enough, Jake?”
When he insisted on buying the penthouse apartment in Manhattan, he thought she’d divorce him. Phoebe wanted him to close shop, promising that she’d turn the Cupcake Project over to Eva and Mira House. “Let’s enjoy life, enjoy our money!”
“Kate and Noah would love to be in charge,” she told him repeatedly.
All true.
Phoebe would never believe they wouldn’t have enough money to retire—even if he liquidated every account, their houses, the boats, and damned watches.
Even if he believed finessing the Club closing was possible, the hopelessness of buying out member accounts held him prisoner, especially now. Everyone was demanding cash these days, looking to liquidate, terrified by the recent plunges in the market beginning with last year’s Black Monday. Nobody wanted to ride the waves, stick it out. They all wanted the equivalent of mattresses to hide their money under.
“Jesus, Phoebe,” he wanted to say, “getting out is my damned dream.”
Every day, he wrote numbers in pencil, playing the same game: How much to make it right? The magic formula tantalized him and was always out of reach. There had to be a way. Sure, you heard about all the people who got caught, but he’d bet that more than one guy pulled it off.
The Club was his albatross, a blind, sucking maw of need. Every penny withdrawn meant bringing in another penny. He did nothing but shovel money into the monster’s mouth.
Numbers marched across the pad.
The Club’s cash accounts were dangerously low.