James Grippando: Money to Burn

My phone rang as I entered the lobby. This time it was my Asia team leader calling about the surprising surge at the morning bell for the Tokyo Financial Exchange.

“Mr. Cantella?” I heard a man say as I rounded the corner.

I quickly finished the call and tucked away my cell. In front of me were two men, each wearing a trench coat and an exceedingly serious expression.

“Who wants to know?” I said.

The older man flashed a badge. “Agent Fairchild,” he said. “FBI.”

My heart skipped a beat. Nothing prepared you for a moment like this, especially in an era when finding a federal regulator on Wall Street was like finding a Walmart on Rodeo Drive.

“What’s this about?” I asked.

The agent put away his badge, but he didn’t seem inclined to answer my question. He grabbed my right arm, and the other agent took my left.

“Come with us, sir,” he said, and they escorted me from the lobby.

MALLORY CANTELLA CHECKED HER WATCH. SHE WOULD HAVE BET her Jimmy Choos that Michael was going to be late, as usual, so there was no point getting upset about it. But with nearly a hundred of his closest friends and colleagues waiting, she couldn’t stop the stress from turning the back of her neck into one huge knot.

Where the heck are you, Michael?

By Saxton Silvers’ standards, Michael’s surprise thirty-fifth birthday party was hardly an exercise in keeping up with the Joneses. That would have meant five hundred guests at a society-page event-perhaps a re-creation of Havana’s famous Tropicana nightclub in its 1940s heyday, complete with a salsa orchestra, casino tables, showgirls in feather headdresses, and dinner catered by Bobby Flay. Mallory hadn’t even considered it. Michael wasn’t cheap, but a blowout to end all blowouts in celebration of an accomplishment as meaningless as reaching the age of thirty-five? Never. Not Michael. She had to keep it simple. The Pierre Hotel didn’t really fit that bill, but it was needed for the ruse-a venue she’d chosen to make Michael think that he was on his way to another dull black-tie business event. All would be well when he unwrapped the case of Montepulciano that she had been able to cajole from an obscure Tuscan vineyard by learning to pronounce it with feeling-“Mon-tah-pool-chah-no.”

Assuming he ever gets here.

Mallory downed a Cosmopolitan and was headed toward the bar for another when her best friend came over and grabbed her.

“He’s in the building!” Andrea told her.

Since marrying Michael, Mallory had struggled for acceptance by the Saxton Silvers “It girls,” and Andrea was the first real connection she’d made. It was probably because Andrea wasn’t in the club either. Andrea’s fiancé was new to the firm, the couple having moved from Seattle just eleven weeks earlier.

“Are you sure?” asked Mallory.

“Has my intelligence ever failed you?”

It was true: Andrea’s information was consistently reliable, unlike the usual Saxton Silvers gossip that wound its way from the Pilates studio, to the coffeehouse, to the Madonna-inspired Power Plate workout, to the white-wine-and-salmon-tartare lunch at Barneys.

Mallory hurried up onto the stage and grabbed the microphone. The band stopped, and the event coordinator flashed the lights to get the crowd’s attention.

Exactly on cue, the main doors to the ballroom opened, and Michael entered in the company of two men wearing trench coats. The band immediately started playing “Happy Birthday,” and from the stage Mallory caught Michael’s eye as she led the crowd in singing to him. It had been Andrea’s idea to hire the actors to pose as G-men and haul Michael into the ballroom-a gag that Mallory loved. He looked genuinely stunned.

“Happy birthday, Michael,” she said when the song ended. “I love you.”

A long round of applause followed. A waiter handed Michael a glass of champagne, which he raised in a toast to his wife as he mouthed the words back to her, I love you, too.

It probably would have been too much to expect Michael to climb on stage and say those words into a microphone so that everyone could hear. It would have made Mallory’s night if he had, but it was enough that the weight around her neck was finally lifted.

Mission accomplished.

AT ONE THIRTY A.M. I WAS STANDING AT THE WINDOW IN THE penthouse suite of the Pierre Hotel with a glass of champagne in my hand. If a sea of lights was a sign of life, then the city that never sleeps was living up to its name.

I wasn’t from New York, hadn’t grown up wanting to live here, and fifteen years ago would have laughed in the face of anyone who told me that I would spend my thirty-fifth birthday looking down at Fifth Avenue and Central Park from the forty-second floor of a five-star hotel. Why on earth Mallory and I needed a two-bedroom suite for twenty minutes of birthday sex and a few hours of sleep wasn’t entirely clear, but that was the thing about having money and living in Manhattan. Cummerbunds were stupid, but I owned at least a dozen of them. Champagne gave me a headache, but some well-trained staffer had placed a glass in my hand as I entered the room, the hotel put it on my bill, and I said thank you. I suppose I also should have thanked the guy who had guaranteed me a clear view of my wet, naked wife by designing a shower stall with warm water running between double panes of glass to prevent fogging. I couldn’t explain this life-not to myself, and definitely not to Papa, who of course had been the first to call earlier in the day and wish me happy birthday. The call had ended the way our phone conversations always ended. “Tell your beautiful wife hello for me,” he said. “And love each other. That’s the main thing.” Coming from anyone else, it would have sounded like Pollyanna. But Papa was the real deal. To him, Wall Street was one big “Fonzie scheme,” no matter how many times I told him that Ponzi had nothing to do with Happy Days and Arthur Fonzarelli. Anyway, I took his meaning, and on some level he was right. But tonight I let myself feel the accomplishment of conquering the most amazing city the world had ever known, and like the song goes, “If I can make it there…”

“I can’t wait for your fortieth,” said Mallory as she came up from behind and put her arms around me.

Papa’s favorite crooner was still on my brain, and it suddenly occurred to me that Sinatra’s most depressing song-the one about getting old-skips straight from “when I was thirty-five” to “the autumn of the years.”

“Let’s not think about forty,” I said, still staring out the window.

Mallory rose up on her tiptoes and bit my earlobe. She was still dressed in her evening gown, still wearing her makeup.

“Turn down the bed,” she said. “I’ll be ready in ten minutes.”

We mimicked one of those black-and-white-movie moments where the couple slowly slides apart until their fingertips finally separate as the woman heads off to the dressing room to “slip into something more comfortable.” Mallory was fun that way. Last week, she’d sent me a sexy video by e-mail as an “early birthday present.” It was a parody of Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy birthday, Mr. President” to JFK. (Mallory was certain that I would someday replace my mentor as president of Saxton Silvers.) It was hilarious, but it was also racy enough to warrant an e-mail subject line that read “Just Between Us.” That unique ability to make me laugh and turn me on-sometimes at the same time-was one of the reasons I finally was able to let go of Ivy and remarry.

Ivy.

I was trying not to think of her tonight-it wasn’t fair to Mallory-but Ivy was inevitably a part of my reflective mood. She just filled a different place in my heart, though I could never admit this to Mallory. Mallory and I had been good friends in high school but had never dated-and the entire student body wondered, Why not? She was the salutatorian of our senior class and went on to Juilliard to study dance. I went to the University of Florida, the best school that in-state tuition could buy. We lost touch until Mallory read about Ivy’s disappearance in the Times. She was divorced and living in an efficiency apartment in the Village, an intermediate-level instructor at a modern dance studio, when she called me to lend the support of an old friend. That was exactly how it remained for almost two years until suddenly we asked each other the same question: Why not? We married six months later.