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.’

*

I had Van Loon back onside within ten minutes. We sat in his library, drinking Scotch, and I spun out an elaborate tale for him of an entirely imaginary condition I was

supposed to be suffering from. It was easily treatable with light medication, but I had reacted adversely to a certain element in the medication and this had resulted in my

erratic behaviour. The medication had been adjusted, I’d completed the course and now I was fine. It was a thin enough story, but I don’t think Van Loon was actually

listening very closely to what I was saying – he seemed, rather, to be mesmerized by something in the timbre of my voice, by my physical presence, and I even had the

feeling that what he wanted more than anything else was just to reach over and touch me – and be, in a sense, electrified. It was a heightened version of how people had

reacted to me before – Paul Baxter, Artie Meltzer, Kevin Doyle, Van Loon himself. I wasn’t complaining, but I had to be careful about how I dealt with this. I didn’t

want it to cause any interference, or to unbalance things. I figured the best way to harness it was to keep busy, and to keep whoever I was exerting an influence over

busy as well. With this in mind I swiftly moved the conversation on to the MCL–Abraxas deal.

It was all very delicate, Van Loon said, and time was of the essence. Despite a number of hitches, Hank Atwood was anxious to proceed. Having devised a price

structure to bring to the table, the next step was to propose who should get the top jobs, and what shape the new company should have. Then it would be on to

meetings, negotiations, bull sessions – the MCL-Parnassus people with the Abraxas people – ‘… and us in the middle.’

Us?

I took a sip from my Scotch. ‘Us?’

‘Me, and if it works out, you. Jim Heche, one of my senior vice-presidents knows what’s going on, my wife knows – and that’s about it. Same thing with the

principals. Hank’s just brought in a couple of advisers, he’s being very cautious. That’s why we want this thing wrapped up in a couple of weeks, a month tops.’ He

drained the whisky from his glass and looked at me. ‘It’s not easy keeping the lid on something like this, Eddie.’

We chatted for another half hour or so and then Van Loon said he had to go out. We arranged to meet the following morning at his office. We’d have lunch with

Hank Atwood and then set the ball rolling in earnest.

Van Loon shook my hand at the door and said, ‘Eddie, I sincerely hope this works out. I really do.’

I nodded.

On the way from the library to the main door of the apartment, I’d glanced around, hoping to catch sight of Ginny …

‘Just don’t let me down, Eddie, OK?’

… if she was at home.

‘I won’t, Carl. I’m on this, believe me.’

But there was no sign of her.

‘Sure. I know that. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

*

The lunch with Hank Atwood went very smoothly. He was impressed by my command of the material relating to the deal, but also by my wide-ranging knowledge of

the business world in general. I had no problems answering the questions he asked me, and I even deftly managed to turn a few of them back on Atwood himself. Van

Loon’s relief that things were finally working out was palpable, and I could also sense he was pleased that my performance was reflecting well on Van Loon &

Associates. We’d gone to the Four Seasons again, and as I sat looking out over the room, fiddling with the stem of my empty wine glass, I tried to recall the details of

what had happened the last time I’d been there. But I soon had the weirdest feeling that what I was conjuring up, like a misremembered dream, was unreliable. It even

occurred to me that I hadn’t been there before, not really, but had constructed this memory from what someone had told me, or from something I’d read. However, the

sense of distance from that other time which this created was welcome – because I was here now, and that was all that counted.

I was enjoying it, too – though I only picked at the food and didn’t have anything to drink. Hank Atwood relaxed quite a bit as the lunch progressed, and I even saw

in him a little flicker of that needy reliance on my attention that had become such a feature of earlier, similar relationships. But that was fine. I sat there in the Four

Seasons and revelled in the heady atmosphere, reflecting occasionally – when I reminded myself who these men were – that what I was experiencing could well have

been the prototype for an extremely sophisticated virtual reality game.

*

In any case, this lunch was to be the start for me of a busy, strange and exciting period in my life. Over the following two or three weeks I got caught up in a constant

round of meetings, lunches, dinners, late-night confabulations with powerful, tanned men in expensive suits – all of us in search of what Hank Atwood kept referring to

as ‘vision lock’, that moment when the two parties could agree on a basic outline for the deal. I met with various sorts of people – lawyers, financiers, corporate

strategists, a couple of congressmen, a senator – and was able to hold my own with all of them. In fact, somewhat to the alarm of Carl Van Loon, I became, in a couple

of respects, pivotal to the whole thing. As we approached the critical mass of vision lock, the few of us who were actually in on the deal became quite pally, in a

corporate, cliquey kind of way, but I was the one who provided the social glue. I was the one who was able to paper over the cracks between the two markedly

different corporate cultures. In addition to this, I became utterly indispensable to Van Loon himself. Since he couldn’t bring in his usual teams of people to work on the

deal, he increasingly relied on me to monitor what was going on and to digest and process huge amounts of information – from Federal Trade Commission regulations to

the intricacies of broadband, from appointment times to the names of people’s wives.

While all of this was going on, I managed to do other stuff as well. I made it most days to the Van Loon & Associates gym to burn off some of my excess energy,

spending time on different machines and trying to do an all-round work-out. I managed to keep track of my Klondike portfolio and even got a little action in on the

company trading floor that Van Loon had told me about. I bought a cellphone, which was something I’d been meaning to do for ages. I bought more clothes, and wore

a different suit every day – or, at least, rotated six or seven suits. Since the act of sleeping didn’t feature too prominently in my life any more, I also got to read the

papers and do research, sitting at my computer – late at night, and often deep into the night …

Another part of my life, and one that I couldn’t ignore – unfortunately – was Gennady. Given that I was so busy in this increasingly blurred continuum of waking time,