Investors who’d bought on margin and then been annihilated by the big sell-off.

Poring over opinion pieces in the newspapers, however, wasn’t going to change anything. It wasn’t going to change the fact – for example – that my bank account

had been cleaned out, or that I wouldn’t be able to trade any more at Lafayette.

Putting the newspapers aside, I looked at the bag of cash on the cluttered dining table and reminded myself, for the fiftieth time, that what was in that bag was the

sum total of what I had left in the world – and that I owed it all to a Russian loanshark …

*

Gennady’s visit on Friday morning was going to be the next event of any significance in my life, but I certainly wasn’t looking forward to it. I spent the couple of days in

between drinking and listening to music. At one point during this time – and more than half-way through a late-night bottle of Absolut – I got to thinking about Ginny

Van Loon, and what a curious girl she was. I went online and searched through various newspaper and magazine archives for any references there might be to her. I

found quite a lot of stuff, quotes from ‘Page Six’ and the ‘Styles’ section of the New York Times , clippings, profiles and even some photos – a sixteen-year-old Ginny

out of her head at the River Club with Tony De Torrio, Ginny surrounded by models and fashion designers, Ginny with Nikki Sallis at a party in LA sipping from a

bottle of Cristal. A recent piece in New York magazine repeated the story about her parents reining her in with threats of disinheritance, but the same piece also quoted

friends saying that she had calmed down a lot anyway and was no longer ‘much fun to be around’. Ginny herself was quoted in an article as saying that she’d spent most

of her teens wanting to be famous and now only wanted to be left alone. She’d done some acting and modelling, but had left all of that behind – fame was a disease,

she’d said, and anyone who craved it was a moron. I read these articles over several times – and printed out the photos, which I stuck on my noticeboard.

Large chunks of time seemed to be drifting by now, during which I did nothing but idly surf the Net or sit on the couch and drink – becoming maudlin, confused,

cranky.

*

When Gennady showed up on Friday morning, I was hungover. The mess in my apartment had gotten worse and I’m sure it didn’t smell too good either – though at the

time that aspect of things wasn’t anything I was actually aware of. I was too miserable and sick to notice.

When Gennady arrived at the doorway and stood looking in at the chaos, my worst fear – or one of them, at any rate – was realized. I knew straightaway that

Gennady was on MDT. I could tell from the alert expression on his face and even from the way he was standing. I knew, too, that my suspicion would be confirmed as

soon as he opened his mouth.

‘What’s your problem, Eddie?’ he said, with a mirthless laugh, ‘are you depressed or something? Maybe you need some medication.’ He sniffed and made a face.

‘Or maybe you just need to get an air-conditioning unit in this place.’

It was clear even from those few sentences that his spoken English had improved dramatically. His accent was still quite strong, but his grasp of structures – grammar

and syntax – had obviously undergone some rapid transformative process. I wondered how many of the five pills he’d already taken.

‘Hello, Gennady.’

I went over to the dining table, sat down and extracted a wad of cash from the brown paper bag. I started counting $100 bills, sighing wearily every couple of

seconds. Gennady came into the room and wandered about for a while, surveying the mess. He came to a stop right in front of me.

‘That’s not very safe, Eddie,’ he said, ‘keeping all your money in a fucking paper bag. Someone might come in and steal it.’

I sighed again and said, ‘I don’t like banks.’ I handed him up the twenty-two five. He took it and put it into the inside pocket of his jacket. He walked over to my

desk, turned around and leaned back against it.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘I want to talk to you about something.’

Here it came. I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach. But I tried to play dumb.

‘You didn’t like the treatment,’ I said, and then added, ‘It was just a draft.’

‘Fuck that,’ he said, with a dismissive gesture of the hand, ‘I’m not talking about that. And anyway, don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.’

‘What?’

‘Those pills I stole. Are you going to tell me you didn’t notice?’

‘What about them?’

‘What do you think? I want more.’

‘I don’t have any.’

He smiled, as though we were playing a game – which of course we were.

I shrugged my shoulders and said, ‘I don’t.’

He pushed himself up from the desk and walked over towards me. He stopped where he’d stopped before and slowly reached his hand back into the inside pocket

of his jacket. I was scared, but didn’t flinch. He took out something which I couldn’t see properly. He looked at me, smiled again and then with rapid a motion of his

hand released the blade of a long flick-knife. He placed the tip of the blade at the side of my neck and moved it up and down, scraping it gently against my skin. ‘I want

some more,’ he said.

I swallowed. ‘Do I look like I have any more?’

He paused for a moment and stopped moving the knife, but didn’t withdraw it. I went on, ‘You’ve taken it, right? You know what it’s like, and what it does to you.’

I swallowed again, louder than before. ‘Look around you, does this strike you as the place of someone who’s taking the drug you took?’

‘Well, where did you get it from then?’

‘I don’t know, some guy I met in a—’

He jabbed the knife sharply against my neck and withdrew it quickly.

‘Ow!’

I put my hand up to the point where he’d jabbed me and rubbed it. There wasn’t any blood, but the jab had really hurt.

‘Don’t lie to me, Eddie, because – and make sure you understand this – if I don’t get what I want I’m going to kill you anyway …’ Then he set the point of the knife

to just under my left eye, and pressed it in, gently but firmly. ‘And in stages.’

He continued pressing the knife, and when I could feel my eyeball starting to protrude, I whispered, ‘OK.’

He held the knife in place for a moment and then withdrew it.

‘I can get them,’ I said, ‘but it’ll take a few days. The guy who deals them is very … security conscious.’

Gennady clicked his tongue, as if to say go on.

‘I phone him, and he arranges a pick-up.’ I paused here and rubbed my left eye, but it was really to give me a moment to work out what I was going to say next. ‘If

he catches a whiff of someone else getting involved in this, by the way – someone he doesn’t know – that’s it, we’ll never hear from him again.’

Gennady nodded.

‘And another thing,’ I said, ‘they’re expensive.’

I could tell that he was excited at the prospect of scoring. I could also tell that despite his heavy-handed tactics he would go along with whatever I proposed, and

would pay whatever I asked.

‘How much?’

‘Five hundred a pop …’

He whistled, almost with glee.

‘… which is why I’m out of them. Because we’re not talking dime bags here.’

He looked at me, and then pointed at the money on the table. ‘Use that. Get me … er …’ – he paused, and seemed to be doing some calculations in his head – ‘…

get me fifty or sixty of them. For starters.’

If I did end up giving him any, they would have to come from my stash, so I said, ‘The most I can get in one go is ten.’

‘Fuck that—’

‘Gennady, I’ll talk to the guy, but he’s very paranoid. We’ve got to take this slowly.’

He turned around and walked over to the desk, and then back again.

‘OK, when?’

‘I should be able to get them by next Friday.’

‘Next fucking Friday? You said a few days.’

‘I leave him a message. It takes a few days for him to get back to me. Then another few days to set it up.’

Gennady held the knife out again and pointed it directly in my face. ‘If you fuck with me, Eddie, you’ll be sorry.’

Then he put the knife away and walked over to the door.

‘I’m going to phone you Tuesday.’

I nodded.

‘OK. Tuesday.’

Standing in the doorway, and as though it were an afterthought, he said, ‘So what is this shit anyway? What’s in it?’

‘It’s a … smart-drug,’ I said, ‘I don’t really know what’s in it.’

‘It makes you smart?’

I held out my hands. ‘Well, yeah. Hadn’t you noticed?’ I was going to say something to him about his English and how it had improved, but I decided against it. He

might get offended at the idea that I hadn’t thought his English was good to start with.

‘Sure,’ he said, ‘it’s amazing. What’s it called?’

I hesitated. ‘Er … MDT. It’s called MDT. It’s a chemical name, but … yeah.’

‘MDT?’

‘Yeah. You know, score some MDT. Do some MDT.’

He looked at me for a moment, dubiously, and then said, ‘Tuesday.’

He went out into the hallway, leaving the door open. I remained sitting in the chair and listened to him clumping down the stairs. When I heard the door of the

building banging closed I stood up and went over to the window. I looked out and saw Gennady pacing along Tenth Street towards First Avenue. From the little I knew

of him, the lightness in his step seemed, to say the least, uncharacteristic.

*

Looking back now – from the dead stillness of this room here in the Northview Motor Lodge – I can see that Gennady’s intrusion into my life, his attempt to muscle in

on my supply of MDT, had quite an unsettling effect on me. I had lost nearly everything and I resented the idea that someone could so easily destroy what little there

was left. I hadn’t wanted to take MDT at full throttle any more because I was scared of surrendering myself to another blackout, scared of being open again to that

same level of darkness and unpredictability. But neither did I want to just give up and leave everything behind – and especially not for a circling vulture like Gennady to

pick at and tear apart. Besides, the idea of Gennady on MDT seemed a complete waste to me. Suddenly the guy was able to speak comprehensible English? Big

fucking deal. He was still a bonehead, a zhulik. MDT wasn’t going to change someone like him. Not the way it had changed me …

*

On foot of this realization, I decided I had to make one last effort. Maybe I could salvage something from the situation. Maybe I could even reverse it. I’d make another

call to Donald Geisler and plead with him to talk to me.

What harm could it do?

I rooted out Vernon’s black notebook, found the number and dialled it

‘Yep?’

I paused for a second and then rushed into it.

‘This is Vernon Gant’s friend again, don’t hang up, please … five minutes, all I want is five minutes of your time, I’ll pay you …’ – this came to me on the spur of the

moment – ‘… I’ll pay you five thousand dollars, a thousand dollars a minute, just talk to me …’

I stopped, and there was silence. As I waited, I stared over at the brown paper bag on the table.

He released a long sigh. ‘Jeesus!’

I didn’t know what this meant, but he hadn’t hung up on me. I decided not to push it. I remained silent.

Eventually, he said, ‘I don’t want your money.’ He paused again, and then said, ‘Five minutes.’

‘Thank you … very much.’

He gave me the address of a café on Seventh Avenue in Park Slope in Brooklyn and told me to meet him there in an hour. He was tall and would be wearing a plain

yellow T-shirt.

I had a shower and shaved, knocked back a quick cup of coffee and some toast, and got dressed. I picked up a cab straightaway out on Tenth Street.

The café was small and dark and nearly empty. Sitting alone at a table in the corner was a tall man wearing a plain yellow T-shirt. He was drinking an espresso.

Beside his cup, neatly stacked, he had a pack of Marlboros and a Zippo lighter. I introduced myself and sat down. From his greying hair and the lines around his eyes, I

reckoned that Donald Geisler was about fifty-five years old. He had the tired, gruff demeanour of someone who’s been around the block a few times, and probably a

few different blocks at that.

‘OK, then,’ he said, ‘what do you want?’

I gave him a quick and heavily edited version of events. At the end I said, ‘So what I really need to know about is dosage. Or, failing that, if you’ve heard of an

associate of Vernon’s called Tom, or Todd.’

He nodded his head, pensively, and then stared at his espresso cup for a few moments. As I waited for him to gather his thoughts, or whatever it was he was doing, I

took out my pack of Camels and lit one up.

I’d smoked more than half of the cigarette before Geisler spoke. It occurred to me that if we were supposed to be sticking to the five-minute rule, we were already

way over time.

‘About three years ago,’ he said, ‘three and a half maybe, I met Vernon Gant. I was an actor at the time, with a small company I’d co-founded five years before

that. We did Miller and Shepard and Mamet, that kind of thing. We had some success – especially with a production of American Buffalo. And we toured a lot.’

I knew immediately from the tone in his voice, as well as from the languid narrative route he appeared to be taking, that despite his earlier protests, he was in this for

the long haul.

I discreetly ordered two more espressos from a passing waitress and lit up another cigarette.

‘Around the time I met Vernon was also when the company decided to change direction and mount a production of Macbeth – which I was going to take the lead

in. And direct.’ He cleared his throat. ‘At the time, meeting Vernon seemed like a piece of really good luck – because here I am scared shitless at the prospect of doing

Shakespeare and this guy is offering me … well, you know what he was offering me.’

Geisler’s delivery was slow and deliberate, his voice like gravel. It was an actor’s voice. I also got the impression, as he went on, that he had never spoken about this

stuff to anyone before. His account of the early days of MDT was much fuller than Melissa’s had been but was essentially the same. In his case, he’d received the pitch

from Vernon, been unable to resist and after a couple of 15mg doses had memorized the entire text of Macbeth – thoroughly intimidating his cast and crew in the

process. He’d then gone on, over the early rehearsal period, to take a further dozen pills, an average of about three a week. The pills were unmarked, but Vernon’s

partner, a guy called Todd, had shown up one day with Vernon and explained the dosage and something about what was in MDT and how it worked. This Todd

character had also asked Geisler questions about how he was responding to the drug and if he’d been experiencing any adverse side-effects. Geisler had said that he

hadn’t.

Two weeks before opening, and under intense pressure, Geisler had cleaned out what he had in the bank and upped his intake to six pills a week – ‘Nearly one a

day,’ he said.