Lee Vance: The Garden of Betrayal

“I’m sorry,” he apologized a few moments later. “I’m kind of a wreck right now.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

The barman cutting limes a few feet away was obviously listening, so I suggested we move to a table. Alex had his glass refilled first. Less than ten minutes after walking through the door and he was on the equivalent of his fifth drink. We settled in a corner beneath a clock with oversized clown feet swinging side to side like a pendulum. A polka dot-painted arm protruding from the side rocked back and forth in time with the feet, perpetually threatening to launch a cream pie.

“You know what sucks?” Alex asked, elbows on the table as he rubbed his scalp with both hands.

“What?”

“That you’re such a hard guy to whine to.”

I gave him a smile to acknowledge the humor in the remark. It was something I’d noticed-people were self-conscious about complaining around me. Almost no matter their difficulty, my hardship trumped theirs.

“I just wish…”

“What?” I asked, as he trailed off.

“I made mistakes back when I had Torino. My dad says that mistakes are contagious.”

His mistake had been trying to launch his own fund fresh out of graduate school, the way Walter had launched Cobra when he left the army. But where Walter succeeded, Alex had failed, as almost anyone his age would. His confidence had never recovered.

“You can’t change the past,” I said, repeating a truth I struggled to accept every day.

“Maybe not,” he mumbled. “But it’s like that butterfly thing. Everything might have been different.”

I leaned back in my chair unhappily. It was something I’d seen before-guys who got smacked around by the market, and who became obsessed with some specific event or decision that had gone the wrong way. Like the former high school quarterback who’d be playing in the pros if only the coach had let him pass more the night the college scout came around, they became convinced that everything would have worked out fine if it hadn’t been for that one unlucky moment. It was a level of delusion I hadn’t seen Alex descend to before, and if he’d been anyone else, I would have finished my beer and walked out on him. I’d spent too much time with drunken traders to have any patience for their particular brand of self-pity. Alex was different, though. It wasn’t just that I was grateful to him. I cared about him, if only because he so clearly needed to be cared about. I wanted him to be happy.

“Listen,” I said, reaching out to nudge his shoulder. “Can I be honest with you?”

“Of course,” he answered stiffly.

“You’ve been giving this job your best shot for years. Maybe it’s time to admit that the hedge-fund business isn’t what you’re cut out for. Look at me: I’m a smart guy, but I realized long ago that I don’t have the constitution to pull the trigger every day. And look at the people who are successful-a lot of them are just riding for a fall. Fifty percent of everything is luck. You know that. So why continue to beat yourself up?”

“You think generating return is about being lucky?” he demanded acidly.

“You think luck isn’t important?” I countered.

“For most guys. But what about people like my father? The ones who never blow up?”

Walter had thrived during the financial implosion, hoarding Treasuries and relentlessly shorting the banks. His success had burnished his already immaculate reputation to a godlike sheen.

“The ones who haven’t blown up yet, you mean. Read some history. Napoleon looked pretty good until he took off for Moscow. Anybody can roll snake eyes.”

Alex opened his mouth and then visibly bit back an angry reply, taking another slug from his glass.

“You should be focused on the political stuff,” I advised. “There’s a big opportunity for you there.”

He shook his head dismissively.

“Why not?”

“I’d prefer banging cocktail waitresses,” he muttered sarcastically. “That was the job Fredo got, wasn’t it?”

Alex was being both stubborn and stupid. Walter and his circle had left Washington alone until the late nineties, when a handful of congressmen made a halfhearted attempt to regulate hedge funds in the wake of the Long-Term Capital Management disaster. Once politics caught their interest, it hadn’t taken them long to figure out that it wasn’t dissimilar to the other arenas they played in, save that the trick was pushing money into the game without breaking any rules, as opposed to taking it out. They had a lot of money, and they were very good at working around the rules. Walter’s latest stratagem was to channel his coterie’s largesse through a new, ostensibly independent public advocacy group: Americans for Free Markets. He’d suggested that Alex become the group’s first CEO. Alex-predictably-had interpreted the offer as a vote of no confidence in his trading abilities, and sunk deeper into his funk.

“You’re not thinking about this right,” I said, wishing I could cut through the bitterness and disappointment to the Alex I used to know. “You could become very influential.”

He shrugged and drained his glass, rattling the ice cubes at the barman. I kept quiet against my better judgment, wondering if I was going to have to carry him home.

“That reminds me,” he said, when the barman had left. “I’m supposed to invite you to the NASCAR lunch tomorrow.”

NASCAR was the extant political organization, an informal club that Walter and his proteges had first convened fifteen years earlier to coordinate their initial forays into Washington. The decidedly less high-minded name was an acronym of its closely held mission statement: Never accommodate stupid congressmen and regulators.

“Why me?” I asked.

“Senator Simpson is going to be in. His handler, Clifford White, called today and asked if you could join. The senator has some new thoughts on energy policy.”

Simpson was tipped as an early favorite for the Republican presidential nomination. It surprised me that he’d break bread with Walter and his cronies in the current political climate, but a moment’s reflection led me to wonder whether it mightn’t be a shrewd move. The newspapers would likely be vilifying someone else by the time the election rolled around, and the big money for national campaigns always came from Wall Street.

“Any other guests?” I asked.

“Nikolay Narimanov. White invited him as well.”

Narimanov’s name was more of an enticement to me than Simpson’s. The wealthiest and most successful of the Russian oligarchs who’d risen from the ashes of the Soviet Union, Narimanov had built an energy empire that spanned the globe. I’d been following his companies for years, but I’d never met him.

“That’s kind of unusual, isn’t it?”

“I’m just the messenger boy. Yes or no?”

Meeting Narimanov wasn’t an opportunity to pass up.

“Yes.”

“Okay, then.”

We sat in silence while Alex drank some more. The clown clock struck the hour overhead, hands spinning rapidly in opposite directions. Alex suddenly lurched toward me, spilling vodka onto the table.

“Tell me,” he pleaded, voice thick. “How do you do it?”

“Do what?” I asked, realizing he was about to cry.

“Not despair.”

I laid one hand on his as a tear trickled down the side of his face. After Kyle disappeared, I’d had panic attacks, bouts of crushing chest pain that dropped me to my knees and left me gasping for air. It had taken three separate cardiologists to persuade me that there was nothing physically wrong. The severity of the attacks had lessened through time, but I still felt the tightening in my chest when I got overloaded with work or family stuff.