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

back to her place, she’ll do some digging. Another excuse for her to stay home tonight. She tells him, “I understand . . . I’ll talk to Michaud, and if he’s good with it, I’ll see what I can come up with.”

12
    New York City
    H e runs across Seventh and flags down a taxi.
    â€œUpper East,” he tells the cabbie. “Ninety-third and York.” Then, after a pause, even though he only visited once, months ago, he sees the number of the building’s address in his mind’s eye. Cruising east across town on 23rd he redials Weiss. Nothing.
    On First, as the cab approaches the NYU Medical Center, Havens turns from the window and looks down. This is where he rushed that night after he got the call about his daughter. Miranda was out for a rare night on the town with her teacher friends. Dinner and drinks. She needed it. She deserved it. He was out on one of many nights on the town with Salvado and clients, all of them already rich but working on more. He had arranged to have the night off, but Salvado said he needed him. Said it was huge. Everything was huge, every week, every day. Every deal. The biggest yet. The most important ever. Of course he went. Though he could take or leave the socializing, in many ways the 24/7 demands of the job fed into his obsession.
    â€œAll-consuming,” Miranda called his job. Looking back, he realized the phrase could be applied to the rising importance of materialism in their life and the society in which they lived. All-consumer. All-consuming.
    He was supposed to get home by eleven that night to relieve the babysitter, but things were running late—they were moving on to 1Oak for drinks—and this was an important meeting, an important client. The biggest ever that week. The babysitter, a nice enough young woman from Australia, said no problem. She’d cover.
    Besides, Erin was sound asleep.
    Miranda got the first call. She was walking, on her way home from her night out, two blocks away from the apartment. He was in a nightclub, talking about derivatives and recounting his sub-prime heroics with a man who owned a plastics company, when his phone began to vibrate.
    It was an allergic reaction. Until that night they’d had no knowledge that Erin was allergic to anything. Miranda rode in the ambulance with her. Erin was gone long before Havens reached the ER.
    Soon after that, he and Miranda were gone, too.
    * * *
    He doesn’t look back up until the taxi rises out of the tunnel past the United Nations tower. Even after midnight there’s still a group of people gathered on the sidewalk protesting something somewhere. Traffic slows to look. The cabbie curses at the delay, but Havens looks, too. He sees beauty in their anger, their outrage at human atrocity and greed, and their right to protest it. It is, he decides, the essence of his relationship with the city. It’s the essence of his relationship with everything: amazed and conflicted, briefly engaged, transfixed, then detached.
    Weiss’s building is worse than he remembered. Certainly not the building of a hedge fund guy. The lock on glass door number one has been punched out. In the take-out menu–cluttered lobby he sees Weiss’s name Scotch taped on the bank of battered mailboxes. He almost presses the buzzer but sees that it won’t be necessary. Someone has left the bolt open against the jamb for door number two, so he simply opens it and heads upstairs.
    Near the top of the third flight of stairs he begins to walk softly. He pauses at the half-open door to Weiss’s apartment. The common hallway smells of garlic, garbage, and neglect. Human and otherwise. He clenches his fist and raises his hand to knock, but at the last moment he decides not to, though he still keeps his fist clenched.
    The door glides open without a creak. Two steps into the hallway, just past a framed print for the Sex Pistols’ Pretty Vacant , he looks to the