I hadn’t planned any of this, of course, and as I was doing it I didn’t really believe I’d get away with it either, but the boldest stroke was yet to come. After he’d

agreed to do consultancy on ‘the project’ and we’d established a few ground rules, I managed to edge the conversation back around to the loan. I told him my advance

on the book had already been spent and that the 75K was a gambling debt I had to pay off – and had to pay off today.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

This matter was now a minor distraction to Gennady. He took out his cellphone and had a quick conversation with someone in Russian. Then, still on the phone, he

asked me a series of questions. What was my social security number? Driver’s licence number? What were the names of my landlord and my employer? Where did I

bank and what credit cards did I hold? I took out my social security card and driver’s licence, and read out the relevant numbers. Then I gave him the names and the

other stuff he wanted while he relayed the information in Russian to the person on the other end of the line.

With that taken care of, Gennady put away his phone and got back to talking about the project. Fifteen minutes later his phone rang. As before, he spoke in Russian,

at one point covering the mouthpiece with his hand and whispering, ‘That OK, you cleared. So – what? Seventy-five? You sure? You want more? A hundred?’

I paused, and then nodded yes.

When he’d finished on the phone, he said, ‘Will be ready in a half-hour.’

Then he put the phone away and placed his hands down flat on the table.

‘OK,’ he said, ‘so who we going to cast in this thing?’

*

Half an hour later, on the nose, another young guy arrived. Gennady introduced him as Leo. He was skinny and not unlike Gennady, but he didn’t have Gennady’s eyes,

didn’t have what Gennady had – looked, in fact, like he’d had whatever it was Gennady did have surgically removed. Maybe they were brothers, or cousins, and

maybe – I started thinking – maybe I could make something out of this. They spoke in Russian for a moment and then Leo pulled a thick brown envelope out of his

jacket pocket, put it on the table, slid out of the booth and left without saying a word. Gennady shoved the envelope in my direction.

‘This a knockdown, OK? Short term. Five repayments, five weeks, twenty-two-five a time. I come by your place each …’ He paused, and stared at the envelope

for a moment. ‘… each Friday morning, start two weeks from today.’ He held the envelope up in his left hand. ‘This no joke, Eddie – you take this now … you mine.’

I nodded. ‘I go into other stuff?’

I shook my head.

The other stuff being, I presumed – at the very least – legs, knees, arms, ribs, baseball bats, switchblades, electric cattle-prods maybe.

‘No.’ I shook my head again. ‘It’s OK. I understand.’

I was anxious to get away now that I had the cash, but I could hardly appear to be in too much of a hurry. It turned out, however, that Gennady himself had to go,

and was already late for another appointment. We’d exchanged phone numbers, so before he left we agreed that in a week or so we’d make some arrangement to meet

again. He’d check up on some stuff, and I’d work a little more on shaping – maybe even expanding – the central character of what had somehow mutated, during the

course of our conversation, from a novel into a screenplay.

Gennady put on his Ray-Bans and was ready to go. But he paused, and reached over to shake my hand. He did this silently, solemnly.

Then he got up and left.

*

I called Klondike from the payphone in the diner. I explained the situation and they gave me the address of a bank on Third Avenue where I could deposit cash that

would immediately be credited to my account.

I thanked Nestor for his help and then took a cab to Sixty-first and Third. I opened the envelope in the back of the cab and fingered the wads of hundred-dollar bills.

I’d never seen this much cash before in my life and I felt dizzy just looking at it. I felt even dizzier handing it over at the bank and watching the teller count it.

After that, I took another cab back to Tenth Street and got settled down to work again. In my absence, the stocks I was holding had increased dramatically in value,

bringing my base capital up to $50,000. This meant that with Gennady’s contribution I now had almost $150,000 at my disposal, and with only a couple of hours’

trading time left – and consequently very little time for research – I just jumped right into it, tracking valuations, schlepping stocks around, buying, selling, sprinting back

and forth across the various rows of figures on the computer screens.

This process gathered considerable momentum and peaked late in the afternoon with two big scores – let’s call them Y and Z – high-risk, high-yield stocks, each on

a rapid upswing. Y carried me as far as the $200,000 mark, and Z carried me considerably beyond it, to just over a quarter of a million. It was a tense, sometimes

harrowing few hours, but it gave me a real taste for the thrill of facing down the odds, and also for large quantities of adrenalin, a substance I could almost feel being

secreted into, and moving through, my system – almost the way share prices themselves shifted and moved through the markets.

Despite my success rate, however, or maybe because of it, a sense of dissatisfaction began to creep over me. I had the feeling that I could be doing a lot more than

just trading at home on my PC, and that being a guerrilla market-maker wasn’t going to be anywhere near enough to keep me happy. The fact is, I wanted to know

what it would be like to trade from the inside, and at the highest levels … what it would be like and how it would feel to buy millions of shares at a time …

*

I phoned Kevin Doyle, therefore – the investment banker I’d gone for breakfast with a few Sundays before – and arranged to meet him for drinks at the Orpheus

Room.

The last time we met he’d been very intent on giving me advice about setting up a portfolio of stocks, so I thought I could maybe pick his brains a little and get some

tips on how to move into the big league.

Kevin didn’t recognize me at first when he arrived at the bar. He said I’d changed and was considerably slimmer than when we’d met at Herb and Jilly’s.

He wanted to know where I worked out.

I looked at him for a moment. Herb and Jilly’s? Then I realized that whoever Herb and Jilly were, it must have been at their place on the Upper West Side that I’d

ended up that night.

‘I don’t work out,’ I said. ‘Working out is the new lunch, it’s for wimps.’

He laughed, and then ordered an Absolut on the rocks.

Kevin Doyle was around forty, forty-two, and fairly trim himself. He was wearing a charcoal suit and a red silk tie. I couldn’t remember much of what I’d told him at

Herb and Jilly’s, or afterwards in that diner on Amsterdam Avenue, but one thing I did remember clearly was that I’d done most of the talking, and Kevin – apart from

trying to turn me on to some stock tips – had hung on my every word. It’d been that thing again, that wanting-to-impress-me, wanting-to-be-my-best-friend thing that