Read Online The Last Trade by James Conway - Free Book Online

office, he reflexively raised a finger, pausing their talk, and answered it. Miranda was on her way out the shop door before their order was ready.
    â€œIf I’d have known . . . ,” he says now.
    â€œReally, Drew? Well, since you have known, how different has it been? How different have you been? Best I can tell, you still work day and night. You still live for the numbers. You still don’t socialize, unless it’s with Salvado and his money monsters.”
    â€œIt’s because no one . . .”
    â€œIt’s because you choose not to. Have you been on a date since . . .”
    â€œSince you left?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œOf course not.” Then, “Have you?”
    She pauses, then sighs. “Drew, you’ve got to move on, and engage with the rest of the universe.”
    He looks for the moon. The possessive apostrophe. The official punctuation of this night. Who will own it? Who will be owned by it? Somehow it’s disappeared during their conversation and is hanging over someone else’s night.
    She continues. “People aren’t going to always seek you out.”
    Butyou did , he thinks. You’ve sought me out twenty times . I have the messages to prove it. “You know, in two weeks, she’d have been . . .”
    â€œStop . . . Please . . .”
    The line clicks with another call. Weiss again. Miranda says, “Why don’t you go ahead and get that, Drew?”
    â€œBecause—”
    â€œGet it,” she interrupts. Then, before hanging up, she says, “The rest of your life is calling.”
    * * *
    After she’s gone, he stares at the city, but nothing registers. Not the surrounding buildings, the soft glow over the high-rises, or the darker universe above. This is how it has always been, since he was a child. One or two things mattered and everything else was an afterthought.
    First it was birds. Every type in North America, then Asia, then Europe, and so on until, at age four, he had exhausted birds. Then it was Native American Indians. Every nation, every tribe, every ritual, cultural contribution, triumph, and atrocity they experienced. Then aircraft, from the Wright Brothers through the Space Shuttle. He needed to know more. He needed to know everything. He used to cry at night not because others mocked his obsessions (and they did), but because he knew he was different. The intense solitary focus, the need to know more and then everything, often at the expense of those who loved him most.
    He was eleven when he discovered numbers. Mathematics. Statistics. Data. The markets. The global economy. When computers were added to the equation of his life, the change was exponential. Software enabled him to experience numbers as if they were music. He was the creator and conductor and fanatical audience of his own number music, which played out in an endless symphony. It was still a solitary obsession, but this time, because it was numbers and involved computers and, potentially, the making of money, people were more tolerant. No one thought that he was odd, or had an affliction, or suffered any kind of syndrome.
    They thought he was gifted.
    He redials Weiss’s number, but again, no one answers. After twenty rings he clicks off and looks at his inbox. The only unopened file there is a text. Sent from Weiss, just before he shut off his phone at the club:
    Â 
    Help 3.338-9

11
    Hong Kong
    S he doesn’t have to be here, but stepping out of the elevator and into the empty lobby of Hang Seng Bank’s legal floor, she realizes that she can’t help it. She realizes that her curiosity about the death of Patrick Lau transcends the demands of her job. It’s a much-needed diversion, and perhaps because of his age and the dark reality of her own existence, Lau’s death has taken on something of a morbid fascination.
    After all, she’s already done more than her