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I was hoping, as the doors whispered closed, that she wouldn’t follow me, and she didn’t.

[ 16 ]

I WALKED OUT OF THE CELESTIAL and across the plaza towards Tenth Avenue, keenly aware of the colossal rectangular slab of bronze-tinted glass shimmering in the sun behind me. I was also aware of the possibility that Alison Botnick was still up on the sixty-eighth floor, and maybe even staring down at the plaza – which of course made me feel like an insect, and more so with each step I took. I had to walk several blocks along Thirty-third Street, past the General Post Office and Madison Square Garden, before finding a taxi. I never once looked back, and as I got settled into the cab I kept my head down. There was a copy of the New York Post lying folded on the seat beside me. I picked it up and held it tightly in my lap.

I still wasn’t sure if anything had happened back there, but the merest hint of that clicking business starting up again absolutely terrified me. I sat still and waited, gauging each flicker of perception, each breath, ready to isolate and assess anything out of the ordinary. A couple of minutes passed, and I seemed to be OK. I then relaxed my grip on the newspaper, and by the time we were turning right on to Second Avenue, I had calmed down considerably.

I flipped open the Post and looked at the front page. The headline was FEDS PROBE REGULATORS. It was a story about goings-on at the New York State Athletic Commission and was accompanied by extremely unflattering photos of two NYSAC officials. As usual in the Post, across the top of the front page, above the masthead, there were three boxed headlines with page references for the articles inside. The middle one, white type on a red background, immediately caught my eye. It said, MEX PAINTER’S WIFE IN BRUTAL ATTACK, page 2. I paused for a second, staring at the words, and was about to flick over to the story when I noticed the headline beside it. This one – white on black – said, MYSTERY TRADER CLEANS UP, page 43. I fumbled with the paper, trying to get it open, and when I eventually got to the article, which was in the business section, the first thing I saw was Mary Stern’s by-line.

My stomach started churning.

I couldn’t believe she’d gone ahead and written something about me, and especially after the way I’d spoken to her on the phone – but then maybe that was why. The text of the article took up half a page and was accompanied by a large photo of the Lafayette trading room. There were Jay Zollo and the others, swivelled around on their chairs, staring into the camera.

I started reading.

Something unusual has been going on in one of the day-trading houses down on Broad Street. In a room with fifty terminals and as many baseball caps, guerrilla marketmakers shave and scalp their way to tiny profit margins – an eighth of a point here, a sixteenth of a point there. It’s a hard graft at Lafayette Trading and the atmosphere is undeniably tense.

I was named in the second paragraph.

But last week all of that changed as new kid on the block, Eddie Spinola, walked in off the street, opened an account and launched straight into an aggressive short-selling spree that left seasoned traders in the Lafayette pit gasping for breath – and reaching for their keyboards, as they followed his leads and swept up profits unheard of in the day-trading world. But get this – undisputed King Rat by the end of his first week, mystery trader Eddie Spinola has since gone AWOL …

I couldn’t believe it. I skimmed the rest of the paragraph.

refuses to speak … cagey with fellow-traders … evasive … elusive … hasn’t been seen for days …

The article went on to speculate about who I was and what I might be up to, and included quotes from, among others, a baffled Jay Zollo. A sidebar gave details of trades I’d made and of how various Lafayette regulars had benefited – one guy making enough for a down-payment on an apartment, another booking himself in for some long overdue dental surgery, a third catching up on alimony arrears.

It was a strange feeling, being written about like this, seeing my name in print, in a newspaper, especially in the business section of a newspaper. It was even stranger that it should be in the business section of the New York Post.

I looked out at the traffic on Second Avenue.

I didn’t know what any of this meant – in terms of my privacy, or of my relationship with Van Loon, or of anything – but there was one thing I was sure of: I didn’t like it.