Finally, some movement in Kineavy’s face, a flick in his eyes, a shift of his chin. He lit another cigarette and raised one eyebrow ever so slightly as the match found the tobacco. “And people call me a killer.”
SHE THOUGHT ABOUT it later, how he was right. How there was this weird disconnect at the center of the culture around various acts of amorality. If you sold your body or pimped someone who did, stuck up liquor stores, or, God forbid, sold drugs, you were deemed unfit for society. People would try to run you out of the neighborhood. They would bar their children from playing with yours.
But if you subverted federal regulations to sell toxic assets to unsuspecting investors and wiped out hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of jobs and life savings, you were invited to Symphony Hall and luxury boxes at Fenway. Alan had convinced the entire state of Arkansas to invest in bundled sub-primes he knew would fail. When he’d told Nicole this, back in ’07, she’d been outraged.
“So the derivatives you’ve been selling, they’re bad?”
“A lot of them, yeah.”
“And the CD, um, whatta you —”
“Collateralized debt obligations. CDOs, yeah. They pretty much suck too, at least a good sixty percent of them.”
“But they’re all insured.”
“Well . . .” He’d looked around the restaurant. He shook his head slowly. “A lot of them are, sure, but the insurance companies overpromised and underfunded. Bill ever comes due, everyone’s fucked.”
“And the bill’s going to come due?”
“With Arkansas, it sure looks like it. They bundled up with some pretty sorry shit.”
“So why not just tell the state retirement board?”
He took a long pull from his glass of cab. “First, because they’d take my license. Second, and more important, that state retirement board, babe? They might just dump those stocks en masse, which would ensure that the stocks would collapse and make my gut feeling come true anyway. If I do nothing, though, things might — might — turn out all right. So we may as well roll the dice, which is what we’ve been doing the last twenty years anyway, and it’s turned out okay. So, I mean, there you go.”
He looked across the table at her while she processed all this, speechless, and he gave her the sad, helpless smile of a child who wasn’t caught playing with matches until after the house caught fire.
“Damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” Alan said, and ordered another bottle of wine.
The retirees lost everything when the markets collapsed in 2008. Everything, Alan told her through sobs and whimpers of horror. “One day — fuck, yesterday — old guy worked his whole life as a fucking janitor or pushing paper at city hall, he looked at a statement said he’d accrued a quarter million to live off of for the final twenty years of his life. It’s right before his eyes in bold print. But the next day — today — he looked and the number was zero. And there’s not a thing he can do to get it back. Not one fucking thing.”
He wept into his pillow that night, and Nicole left him.
She came back, though. What was she going to do? She’d dropped out of community college when she met Alan. The prospects she had now, at her age and level of work experience, were limited to selling French fries or selling blow jobs. Not much in between. And what would she be leaving behind? Trips, like the one to Paris, for starters. The main house in Dover; the city house twenty miles away in Back Bay; the New York apartment; the winter house in Boca; the full-time gardener, maid, and personal chef; the 750si; the DB9; the two-million-dollar renovation of the city house; the one-point-five-mil reno of the winter house; the country club dues — one country club so exclusive that its name was simply the Country Club — Jesus, the shopping trips; the new clothes every season.
So she returned to Alan a day after she left him, telling herself that her duty was not to honor a bunch of people she didn’t know in Arkansas (or a bunch of people she didn’t know in Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Maine, and, well, forty-five other states); her duty was to honor her husband and her marriage.
Honor became a harder and harder concept to apply to her husband — and her marriage — as 2008 turned into 2009, and then as 2009 turned into 2010.
Outside of losing his job because his firm went bankrupt, Alan was fine. He’d dumped most of his own stock in the first quarter of ’08, and the profit he made paid for the renovation of the Boca place. It also allowed them to buy a house she’d always liked in Maui. They bought a couple of cars on the island so they wouldn’t have to ship them back and forth, and they hired two gardeners and a guy to look after the place, which on one level might seem extravagant but on another was actually quite benevolent: three people were now employed in a bad economy because of Alan and Nicole Walford.