James Grippando - Money to Burn

Funny, for all the talking we did about Ivy, I couldn’t help but feel that Mallory’s true impression of her was based on tid-bits of information that she had picked up at firm events-and from rumors started by Shannon and her “gosse” of Saxton Silvers wives who had met Ivy that one time. Even though I counted my blessings for reconnecting with Mallory, I sometimes wondered how my life would have turned out if Ivy and I had just stayed on the cruise as planned. On our last night together, Ivy had made it clear that she was burned out and fed up with Wall Street. Without question, being married to Ivy would have meant leaving New York. Would my life have been better? I couldn’t say. All I knew for certain was that with a beautiful wife in the next room, one who had picked up a microphone and said “I love you” in front of a roomful of invited guests, thoughts like that made me feel guilty as hell.

“Can you pour us some wine, honey?” she called from the next room.

“You got it.”

I went to the wet bar and dumped my overpriced glass of champagne down the sink. I had a conference call with the German Aerospace Center in Stuttgart at nine A.M.-solar power was a hot green investment, and the Germans were years ahead of anyone in the United States-and I couldn’t risk a headache in the morning. Champagne was the only wine that affected me that way, which was one reason I never fully understood the horrific hangover I’d woken up with on the morning of Ivy’s disappearance. And there I was thinking of Ivy again, even as I was opening a bottle of pinot grigio for a woman who was determined to make my thirty-fifth birthday a night I would never forget. Papa’s husky old voice was suddenly inside my head, uttering what had become one of his favorite words since moving to Florida.

Schmuck.

I poured the wine and then checked the label. It was the same Italian wine that Mallory and I had shared on our honeymoon on the Amalfi Coast. Somewhere in my DNA was a male chromosome that wanted to give myself points for at least noticing her sentimentality, but it was Mallory who deserved all the credit tonight. I was thirty-five years old, this was my life, and it was time for me to be more like Papa and focus on what I had, not on what I’d lost. Mallory was not a woman I had settled for. I was lucky to have her. My career was soaring beyond my wildest dreams. Eleven years ago, fresh out of business school, I’d set rather realistic goals to have a net worth of such and such by age thirty, by age thirty-five, and so on. I was way ahead of those numbers.

I took the wine and knocked on the bathroom door. The shower was running, and I knew what that meant. Mallory always showered before marathon sex. Tonight would be no quickie.

“Your wine, madame,” I said as I opened the door.

That double-paned shower really didn’t fog, just as the bellboy who’d showed us to our room had promised. As I stole a glimpse of my fitness-crazed wife, I went ahead and silently thanked that voyeuristic genius, whoever he was, for having invented it.

“Thanks, honey. Leave it on the counter.”

The deluxe suite came with satellite everything, so I found a jazz station on digital radio and then swapped out my tuxedo for a bathrobe. It had been at least seven hours since I’d been online-a world record for me-so I opened my laptop and kicked up my feet. Hoping to fall deeper into a “be thankful for what you have” mind-set, I went to the Saxton Silvers Web page, entered my ID and password, and logged onto my personal investment account. I’d stopped managing my own portfolio years ago, and my buddy out in San Francisco, James Dunn, had agreed to do it only if I promised not to second-guess him on a daily basis. I checked it every few days, and today was a milestone. My liquid assets alone-excluding real estate and other things that couldn’t be quickly converted to cash-were almost ten times the “age thirty-five” goal for my entire net worth that I had set for myself not so many years ago, and I was feeling pretty smug with the anticipation of seeing the numbers on my LCD. I clicked the Account Overview button on the menu, and my heart nearly stopped.

“Ready or not, here I come,” said Mallory.

The bathroom door opened, and she stepped out with the glass of wine in her hand. She was wearing a red teddy, but I was almost too stunned by the on-screen numbers to notice. The look on my face immediately threw her.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

I was still processing things, and it took me a moment to answer. “Were those phony FBI agents at my party the end of the birthday jokes?”

“What do you mean?”

“Did you put someone up to messing with my personal account? As part of a joke, I mean.”

“No,” she said as she slid onto the bed and sat beside me. “Why do you ask? And why are you checking investment accounts now?”

I showed her the screen, and her jaw dropped.

“How can that be?” she said.

“Mallory, please tell me if this is a joke.”

“No, I swear. That’s not even close to being funny. I would never do anything like that.”

The stunned expression on her face didn’t lie-and neither did the account summary.

Zero balance.

I clicked the Refresh button on the tool bar. Same result: zero balance. I clicked Refresh twice more, then completely logged out of the Saxton Silvers Web site and logged back in. Each time, I got the same result. Zero. Nothing. Nada.

“It’s a mistake, obviously some kind of mistake.” I was mumbling to myself, repeating that word-mistake-over and over again, as I clicked around and reviewed my account trading history. Then I froze.

“Michael?” she said with trepidation.

“This is crazy,” I said.

“What?”

“It’s all been liquidated. My entire account-everything was unloaded.”

“Did you sell it?”

“No. That’s the point. Timing is everything in the market. I got killed on most of these transactions.” I kept scrolling down through the history.

“Then why would James have pushed through all these orders?”

“He wouldn’t,” I said. “And from the looks of this summary, he didn’t. Look at this stock here, for example. It was an after-hours trade through an ECN.”

“A what?”

“An electronic communications network. Some are regulated, some aren’t. This one looks like it’s unregulated-which has me even more freaked out. The only seller identified in the transaction reports is me.”

“But you just said you didn’t sell.”

“I didn’t. And some of these transactions are more complicated to unwind than a simple sell order, but it’s the same result. I’m shown as the one who authorized the transaction.”

“How can that be?”

“Don’t you get it? It must have been somebody posing as me.”

“You mean like an identity thief?”

I was suddenly dizzy. My mind didn’t want to go there. “That’s why I was hoping you were going to tell me that this was somebody’s idea of a joke.”

“Michael,” she said, her voice quaking, “did someone take our money?”

The answer was also on the screen. It had all been moved to a low-risk account that I hadn’t touched in years. “It’s okay. It’s there. It wasn’t a good time to liquidate most of these holdings, but it looks like the cash is still with Saxton Silvers.”

“You have to do something. Reverse the transactions, right?”

I grabbed my cell and dialed James in San Francisco. He was asleep-a West Coaster who lived on Wall Street time-but the problem I laid out for him forced him out of bed and over to his computer.

“Holy shit,” he said over the phone. I presumed he was looking at the same screen I had in front of me-the long list of premature sales and other poorly timed transactions.