Vengeance(25)

Alan cried a lot in early 2009. Knowing how many people had lost their homes, jobs, retirement savings, or all three ate at him. He lost weight, and his eyes grew very dull for a while, and even when he signed on with Bank Suffolk and hammered out a contract feathered with bonuses, he seemed sad. He told her nothing had changed; nobody had learned anything. No longer was investment philosophy based on the long-term quality of the investment. It was based on how many investments, toxic or otherwise, you could sell and what fees you could charge to do so. In 2010, banking fees at Alan’s firm rose 23 percent. Advisory fees spiked 41 percent.

We’re the bad guys, Nicole realized. We’re going to hell. If there is a hell.

But what were they supposed to do? Or, more to the point, what was she supposed to do? Give it back? She wasn’t the one shorting stock and selling toxic CDOs and CDSs. And even if she were, the government said it was okay. What Alan and his cohorts had done was, while extremely destructive, perfectly legal, at least until the prosecutors came banging on their door. And they wouldn’t. As Alan liked to remind her, the last person to fuck with Wall Street had been the governor of New York, and look what happened to him.

Besides, she wasn’t Alan. She was his wife.

Maybe she was doing a service to society by hiring Kineavy. Maybe, while she’d been telling herself she didn’t want to leave the marriage because she didn’t want to be poor, the truth was far kinder — maybe she’d hired Kineavy so he’d right a wrong that society couldn’t or wouldn’t right itself.

Seen in that light, maybe she was a hero.



IN ANOTHER MEETING, at another part of the waterfront, she gave Kineavy ten thousand dollars. Over the years, she’d been able to siphon off a little cash here, a little cash there, from funds Alan gave her for the annual Manhattan shopping sprees and the annual girls’ weekends in Vegas and Monte Carlo. And now she passed some of it to Kineavy.

“The other ten when I get there.”

“Of course.” She looked out at the water. A gray day today, very still and humid, some of the skyline gone smudged in the haze. “When will that be?”

“Saturday.” He looked over at her as he stuffed the cash in the inside pocket of his jacket. “None of your servants work then, right?”

She chuckled. “I don’t have servants.”

“No — what are they?”

“Employees.”

“Okay. Any of your employees work Saturday?”

“No. Well, I mean, the chef, but he doesn’t come in until, I think, two.”

“And you usually go out Saturday, go shopping, hang with your girlfriends, stuff like that?”

“Not every Saturday, but it’s not uncommon.”

“Good. That’s what you do this Saturday between ten and two.”

“Between ten and two? What’re you, the cable company?”

“That’s exactly what you’re going to tell Alan. On Thursday afternoon, your cable’s gonna go out.”

“Out?”

He popped his fingers at the air in front of his face. “Poof.”

“Alan’ll go crazy. The Sox play the Yankees this weekend; there’s Wimbledon; some golf thing too, I think.”

“Right. And the cable guy will be coming to fix it Saturday, between ten and two.”

Kineavy stood and she had to look up at him from the bench.

“You make sure your husband’s there to answer the door.”



AT NINE SATURDAY morning, Alan came into the kitchen from the gym. They’d had the gym built last year in the reconverted barn on the other side of the four-car garage. Alan had installed a sixty-inch Sony Bravia in there, and he’d watch movies that pumped him full of American pride as he ran on the treadmill — Red Dawn, Rocky IV, Rambo III, The Blind Side. Man, he loved The Blind Slide, walked around quoting it like it was the Bhaga-vad Gita. He was covered in sweat, dripping it all over the floor, as he pulled a bottle of OJ from the fridge, popped the cap with his thumb, and drank directly from the container.

“Cable guy come yet?”

Nicole took an elaborate look at the clock on the wall: 9:05. “Between ten and two, they said.”

“Sometimes they come early.” He swigged half the bottle.

“When do they come early?”

“Sometimes.”

“Name one time.”

He shrugged, leaned against the counter, drank some more orange juice.

Watching him suck down the orange juice, she was surprised to remember that she’d loved him this past week. Hated him too, of course, but there was still love there. He wasn’t a terrible guy, Alan. He could be funny, and he once flew in her brother, Ben, to surprise her for her thirty-third birthday — Lord knows, he could always be depended on for the grand gesture. When he spent two weeks in Shanghai on business right after her third miscarriage, he sent her white roses every day he was gone. She spent the week in bed, and sometimes she’d place one of those white petals on the tip of her nose and close her eyes and pretend she’d have a child someday.