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So far, the combination of MDT and Dexeron had worked really well for me, and I kept my fingers crossed. I’d been on it for nearly a week now and I hadn’t had the merest hint of a blackout. But for Gennady’s visit I decided to mess up my apartment a little, deliberately. I wanted to play down the intensity of high-dosage MDT and try to convince him that taking more than one pill every couple of days was actually dangerous. That way I could slow him down and give myself a little breathing space. However, I really had no idea what I was going to do about him.

When he came in the door on Friday morning, I could see that he had regressed a little. He didn’t say anything, but just held out his hand and shook it in a gimme motion.

I took a tiny plastic container with ten MDT pills in it out of my pocket and gave it to him. He opened it immediately, standing there, and before I could launch into my spiel about dosage, he had popped one of the pills into his mouth.

He closed his eyes and remained still for a few moments – during which time I stood still as well, and said nothing. Then he opened his eyes and glanced around. I had tried to make the place look untidy, but it hadn’t been easy – and there was certainly no comparison at all between how the place looked now and how it had looked the previous week.

‘You get some, too?’ he said, nodding his head at the general tidiness.

‘Yes.’

‘So you get more than ten? You tell me only ten.’

Shit.

‘I got twelve,’ I said, ‘I managed to get twelve. Two extra for me. But that was a thousand bucks. I can’t afford any more than that.’

‘OK, next week, you get me twelve.’

I was going to say no. I was going to say fuck you. I was going to run at him and see if the physical kick of a triple dose of MDT would be enough to let me overpower him and maybe choke him to death. But I did nothing. I said, ‘OK.’

Because what if it went wrong and I got choked to death – or, at best, I drew the attention of the police? And was finger-printed, booked, keyed into the system? I needed a safer and much more efficient way to get myself out of this situation. And it had to be permanent.

Gennady held his hand out again, and said, ‘The seventeen-five?’

I had the money ready and just gave it to him without saying anything.

He put it into his jacket pocket.

As he was going out the door, he said, ‘Next week, twelve. Don’t forget.’

Carl Van Loon phoned me at seven o’clock that evening. I hadn’t been expecting such a quick response, but I was glad – because now, one way or the other, I could proceed. I’d been getting restless, prickled by an increasing need to be involved in something that would consume all of my time and energy.

‘Eddie.’

‘Carl.’

‘How many times are we going to have to do this, Eddie?’

I took a relatively subdued comment like that as a good sign, and launched into a defensive broadside that culminated in a plea to let me get involved again in the MCL-Abraxas deal. I told him that I was fired up and brimming with new ideas and that if he took a good look at the revised projections he’d see just how serious I was.

‘I have looked at them, Eddie. They’re terrific. Hank’s here and I showed them to him earlier. He wants to meet you.’ He paused. ‘We want to get this thing off the ground.’

He paused again, longer this time.

‘Carl?’

‘But Eddie, I’m going to be straight with you. You pissed me off before. I didn’t know who – or what – I was talking to. I mean, whatever it is you’ve got, some kind of bipolar shit, I don’t know – but that degree of instability is just not on when you’re playing at this level. When the merger is announced there’s going to be a lot of pressure, wall-to-wall media coverage, stuff you can’t imagine if you haven’t already been there.’

‘Let me come and talk to you, Carl, face to face. If you’re not satisfied after that, I’ll back off. You won’t hear from me again. I’ll sign confidentiality agreements, whatever. Five minutes.’

Van Loon paused for a full thirty seconds. In the silence, I could hear him breathing. Eventually, he said, ‘I’m at home. I’ve got something on later, so if you’re coming round, come round now.’