“What’s it’s a matter of,” he explained carefully, “is foresight. Next year I don’t want to be here. I want to be at Baird Financial. Dad and I have talked about it. He’s throwing one of his patented Thanksgiving parties this November and we’re supposed to seal the deal there. This is a tough regulatory atmosphere. We can’t seal the deal if I’ve been arrested for dealing dope. Or even having dope.”
“And you think if Morgenthau’s office does investigate McAdam, they’re going to find dope?”
“Hell,” Tony said, “I don’t even think you need Morgenthau’s office. McAdam is a jerk. He’s one of those idiots just asking to get caught. At everything. Look at the man.”
“Oh,” Mickey said.
“Right,” Tony said, “but you know Ash. Ash is going to insist. I’ve been hanging out all day trying to think of some way out of this mess, and all I can come up with is that I wish Donald McAdam were dead.”
“Maybe he is dead,” Mickey laughed. “Cocaine and strychnine, cocaine and strychnine. Maybe he’s writhing around on his bathroom floor right this minute.”
“Maybe he is,” Tony said, but he didn’t believe it. He didn’t have that kind of luck. With the kind of luck he did have, McAdam would go on taking tiny doses of strychnine with his cocaine until he was a hundred and six, and never feel the ill effects at all.
Unless, of course, something other than luck came along to change the prescription.
5
“Let’s start this all over again at the beginning,” Julie Anderwahl said, stopping dead in the middle of her husband Mark’s wall-to-wall carpeted office floor, throwing out her arms in a wide sweep meant to indicate a willingness to capitulate she did not feel. “We’re talking about twelve and a half million dollars. Not serious money in this market, granted, but still. Twelve and a half million dollars. And Baird Financial is giving this twelve and a half million dollars to a man who pleaded guilty to one hundred and forty counts of securities fraud. A man who shopped half his friends to the Feds. A man who told Geraldo Rivera, on the air, in an upper-class accent so phony it could have made a three-dollar bill look like gold bullion, that the rich can’t be expected to follow the same rules as other people. Baird Financial is going to give twelve and a half million dollars to this man, and I’m supposed to make it look good?”
On the other side of the room, sitting on a black leather swivel chair behind a polished mahogany desk the size of a table tennis table Mark Anderwahl closed his eyes, dredged up an image of the Almighty from his very misty memories of Episcopalian Sunday school, and prayed. What he prayed was that his wife was not about to go on one of her certified rampages, reducing his chair, his desk, and his tie to rubble in the process. He prayed harder than he otherwise might have, because this time he knew she had a point. Julie was an excellent PR woman—probably the best one on the Street—but making the McAdam payoff look good to the Great American Public was an impossibility, and even Jon Baird had to realize that. Even making the McAdam payoff look neutral was probably out of the question. There had been just too much insider sleaze, too many cozy back-room deals, too much fraud. Sometimes it made Mark’s head ache. Passing the racks of magazines in the Pan Am station with their headlines full of Dennis Levine and Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken and Donald McAdam made him physically ill. On the other hand, he had perfect trust in the judgment of his wife. What there was to be done she would do. What could be thought of to be done she would think of to do.
Actually, Mark had always had perfect trust in Julie, from the very first time he saw her, standing in the middle of Harvard Yard at four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon and letting snow fall on her head while she searched through her bookbag for he didn’t know what. He never found out, either. He was too busy accidentally-on-purpose bumping into her, helping her pick up what she had dropped, getting acquainted. He was too busy thinking how absolutely perfect she was. And she was perfect. Mark Anderwahl had been brought up in very thin air. He was the only son of Susannah Baird Anderwahl, only sister of Jon and Calvin Baird, widow of Stephen K. Anderwahl, once president of the largest commercial bank in The Netherlands. Brought back to the States after his father’s death, Mark had been carefully shepherded through all the schools his family considered “right” for him, including Collegiate in Manhattan and the obligatory trip through Groton to Harvard. He had always envied his cousin Tony, who was willing and able to put his foot down and demand a change, even if the change was as minor as accepting a place at Yale. Mark had never been good about putting his foot down about anything. He had never been good at asserting himself in any way. Left to himself, he would quickly have become one of those perpetual boys living on a trust fund, wandering through the expensive restaurants and charity balls of New York City like the Ghost of Achievement Past.