The Futures(85)

“Michael fucking Casey. I could murder this fucking guy,” one trader said to another in the kitchen. People had stopped bothering with silence around me. They didn’t care anymore, or maybe they’d already forgotten who I was.

The other guy laughed bitterly. “You’re gonna have to get in line.”

I felt my throat tighten as I stirred milk into my coffee.

“Fine. I’d settle for just pissing on his corpse if I had to.”

By that point, it was clear to me that Michael was almost certainly going to jail. And the odd thing was, I felt pity for him. If we hadn’t been caught, those same guys would have declared him a hero. They would have admired his brilliance and ballsiness for pulling it off. But in this game, you didn’t score points with hypotheticals. Execution was the only thing that mattered.

Christmas snuck up on me. It was just another day to get through: reruns, takeout, a quiet apartment. My parents called, and so did Arthur. They had seen the news when it broke a few weeks earlier. They knew the outlines of what had happened, but I let the calls go to voice mail. I didn’t feel like talking about it, not yet. There was too much that I hadn’t made sense of. How was I supposed to feel? Guilty, contrite, apologetic? What was I supposed to say? I understood, intellectually, how bad it looked to other people. To people like Arthur and my parents. Normal people. But there was some of me that still saw the upside in what Michael had done. I felt guilt over the wrong thing—over the role I’d played in making the news public. The deal had been working. It was going to make Spire an enormous amount of money. I wasn’t ready to let go of that yet.

After the holidays, I was sitting at my desk when I felt a tap on my shoulder. A man with a crew cut and an ill-fitting suit told me to follow him. We went into the conference room, where another man who looked just like him sat at the table. One was named John, the other Kurt, both of them from the SEC. I immediately forgot who was who.

“Have a seat,” one of them said. “Help yourself to water or coffee or whatever.”

“Thanks,” I said, although their hospitality seemed pretentious when it was our conference room they were occupying.

“You have a good holiday?” one of them asked.

“Um, yeah. It was fine.”

John looked over at Kurt, or vice versa. “Did I tell you I had to drive all the way to Short Hills on Christmas Eve? For that new Elmo doll. Jesus.” He rolled his eyes, then said to me, “Don’t ever get married, okay?”

I laughed. At that moment, the door to the conference room opened. A blond woman in a skirt suit came in, brandishing a briefcase in one hand and a large Starbucks in the other. She stopped, froze. “What did you say to them?” she said, her eyes wide.

“We were just shooting the shit,” John or Kurt said. “Don’t worry.”

“Never talk to him without me here. Understood? That goes for you, too,” she said to me. “You really should know better, Evan.”

But I didn’t even know why I needed a lawyer. The questions that John and Kurt asked were easy, straightforward. I nodded, confirmed, clarified, helped them establish the particulars of the deal: the timeline, the players. As the week went on, my fear started to dissipate. They were treating me like I had done nothing wrong. Maybe I’d be okay. Maybe all wasn’t lost just yet.

“Hold that?”

I pushed the Door Open button. Roger hurried into the elevator. “Oh,” he said, catching his breath. “Thanks, Evan.” I think it was the only time he’d ever thanked me for anything. It was definitely the only time he’d ever used my first name.

“Good weekend?” I asked.

He glanced away, staring instead at the ticking floor numbers as we zoomed up the skyscraper. “Yeah. What about you?”

“Fine,” I lied. The weekends felt endless without the distraction of work. I went through a case of beer without even trying. I had no idea what to do with the time.

We were silent for the rest of the ride up. Both of us were in early. Roger was working on some big new deal with Steve. And I’d been coming in early because I knew that appearances mattered. I needed to prove that I was ready to hit the ground running when this mess was over. I’d been removed from every project, every e-mail distro, but things would be back to normal soon enough.

As Roger and I approached our desks, I saw an unfamiliar woman standing near my chair. A spark of hope: maybe she was there to give me a new assignment.

“Evan Peck?” she said, and I nodded. “Could you come with me, please?”

She led me to the other side of the floor and stopped in front of what I’d always assumed was a supply closet, tucked in the building’s core, far away from the windows. She balanced a stack of binders in one arm while she shuffled through a ring of keys with the other hand. “Do you mind?” she said with a smile, handing me the binders. She was kind of cute.

“Here we go,” she said, finally finding the key. She opened the door and flipped the light switch. It was a small, windowless office. A bare desk, a computer, a chair. It smelled like paint. Yes, I realized, I had in fact seen the janitor opening and closing this door just the other week. “This is nicer, isn’t it?” Her voice had gone up an octave. “Your very own office.”

“I’m supposed to work here?”

“You know, I’ve never heard of an analyst getting his own office before.”