Chapter 72

Arthur Black hated everyone at his going-away party.

That hatred wasn’t entirely new. It wasn’t possible to make senior partner at a firm like Black and Stringer without developing an armor of defensive contempt for most of your coworkers and active loathing for a few. At one time or another in the past quarter century, he’d worked directly with most of the people in the big conference room where Arthur had been “surprised” with drinks and hors d’oeuvres on his last full day at the firm’s New York offices. There were men here who he’d interned for and with and younger ones who had interned for him, several of them now partners themselves. There were men whose wives he’d fucked and one man he’d subtly encouraged his own first wife to fuck as a way of getting rid of her.

Many of these people had done Arthur favors, never without expecting something in return eventually. By his own reckoning, Arthur Black had done vastly more for everyone in this room than they’d ever done for him. In the nine years he’d been at the helm of the team managing the assets of the Grayson-Stone Trust, his patronage had paid for dozens of houses, boats, sports cars, mistresses, second wives, third wives, dominatrixes, and God-knew-what-else for the men in this room.

Sipping from the glass of single-malt Scotch he’d been handed and thinking about the speech he’d prepared in advance, Arthur imagined that he was standing in a room full of fatted ticks who had engorged themselves on his own blood, fallen off, and then returned for another taste. Six months ago, every man here would have claimed Arthur as a friend, some of them perhaps with clenched jaws, but each of them ready to grasp for a bit of the fat that he’d learned to expertly carve from the bones of that massive, sprawling portfolio of real estate holdings, stocks, bonds, closed-end mutual funds, options, swaptions, futures contracts, warrants, commodities, collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and hundreds of more exotic instruments all existing for the sole purpose of turning large amounts of money into slightly larger amounts of money in increasingly complex and obscure ways.

On Arthur’s very first day at Black and Stringer, Hugh Hemmick had said that no one person could hold all the details of the Grayson-Stone estate in their head at one time. That mantra had been repeated to him dozens of times over the years and Arthur had dutifully repeated it back even after he realized it was untrue. What Hugh had really been saying was that he himself couldn’t hold all the details in his head at once, but he’d be damned if he would let someone who could grasp it better take over a minute before he was ready to retire.

By the time Hugh did retire, he had two heirs apparent - Arthur and a woman named Vanessa Comstock. The senior partners planned to make them comanagers of the Trust, but Arthur and Vanessa had struck a deal where he would manage the assets and she would oversee all the litigation regarding the Trust. At the time, billable hours and asset management fees had been close to equal, but Vanessa thought she was getting the better end of the deal because litigation would undoubtedly explode once Colin Grayson-Stone’s named heir came of age. But Arthur had spent the last decade restructuring the trust’s asset portfolio in ways that managed to aggressively enrich the portfolio while often maximizing his own ability to take fees in the process. Besides being unable to remember a few hundred positions at once, Hugh Hemmick had also lacked imagination and, because of that lack of imagination, stuck to well-understood and timeworn instruments. Before Arthur had been allowed to trade the portfolio freely, he’d been given a list of stolid, boring assets that he was never to sell without approval from the firm’s oversight committee. Against nearly everyone’s expectations, Arthur had never tried to trade a single one of them. Factories, hotels, apartment buildings, public utilities, bond funds, and pay-in-kind sovereign debt provided tens of millions worth of income to be ploughed back into the Trust year after year and cushioned the balance sheet so that trading losses never reached the bottom line.

What Arthur had sold was almost everything with any kind of real risk attached to it. Hugh had built up a latticework of moderately risky investments that theoretically hedged against each other’s losses. But Arthur knew that what they really did was insulate the portfolio from its own gains and exacerbate its losses. When the market went up, the portfolio went up a little bit more. When the market went down, the portfolio hemorrhaged money. Arthur cleared out everything that wasn’t rock solid and replaced most of it with derivatives and synthetic instruments. These instruments carried much bigger risks than more traditional investments, but the risks were often hard to understand and therefore easy to ignore. Even better, they were nearly impossible to regulate. Nobody in the government really understood how they worked and the people who did understand them weren’t about to give regulators the real scoop on how they worked. Most of the people who traded them didn’t even understand that they were basically holding plutonium in their hands while wearing tinfoil gloves.

The people who did understand knew that there would always be enormous underlying risks, that every synthetic instrument was based on a mathematical model of reality and all the models were oversimplifications. They also understood that there was an excellent chance that they would be wealthy enough to skate by whatever collapse they caused by the time they caused it.

And then Arthur found the Holy Grail. A big part of his success had come from figuring out what securities were actually worth compared to what the market said they were worth. That knowledge often came from diligently picking apart financial devices that had been designed for opacity. No matter how abstract or synthetic an instrument was, there was always a real, tangible thing at the bottom of it.

In 2006, Arthur Black had been at an investor’s conference half-listening to a seminar on the subject of collateralized mortgage obligations and doodling on a legal pad. A question from the audience caused him to look down at what he had drawn and realize it was a diagram of the tension vectors inherent in those securities. Those tensions looked like a bomb waiting to explode. Thinking too hard about the combination of lending money to people whose primary qualification was that they couldn’t afford to pay it back and an assumption of infinite growth in the housing market made Arthur’s teeth hurt.

Over the next fourteen months, Arthur had put every dollar he could shake loose into an ever-larger bet against those instruments. By the time the market cratered, he was positioned to sit back and watch a billion dollars flow into the Trust in a single day.

Arthur’s own commission on that had been a few paltry million dollars, but he’d made so much money for Black and Stringer that it eclipsed all the billable hours for every lawyer in the firm for the year. He was able to hand out favors like they were Halloween candy. Men with no real understanding of what Arthur had done were soon taking credit for teaching him how to do it and the parking garage filled up with sports cars.

After that initial smashing win, Arthur had gone from victory to victory. There had been losses as well - mistimed bets, well-reasoned positions overwhelmed by an irrational market, plays on the market’s irrationality spoiled when the herd stampeded in an unexpected direction. There had been single days when he’d lost more money than his father had made in an entire career working in patent law, but those stolid boring investments Arthur had never touched kept him from ever having a down year. Occasionally underperforming the market was a fair price to pay for beating the tar out of it the rest of the time. Everything was going according to plan.

Arthur had been so focused on the trust that he’d given no real thought to the boy who would one day inherit it. Inside Black and Stringer, he was referred to only as the heir and the only identifying information known about him was the day he would turn eighteen. Some members of the asset management team had started referring to it as “Zero Day,” but Arthur had dismissed any concerns that the inheritance would bring real changes. When he thought about it at all, he assumed the heir would quickly sate himself on whatever luxuries an eighteen year old boy could imagine constituted real wealth and leave the day-to-day management to Arthur and his team.

The only real, genuine, stupid mistake Arthur had made was in assuming that Nick Coyle would be a reasonable and intelligent man; in hindsight, this was inexcusable. Colin Grayson-Stone had been an idiot man-child whose only redeeming act was dying before he could waste too much of the trust’s money.

Even another drug-addicted wastrel would have been fine. Straddling the worlds of law and finance as he did, Arthur had a Rolodex full of reputable, established drug dealers who could be relied on to sell the boy all the drugs he wanted without upsetting the whole apple cart. People who worried that the heir might snort his whole fortune up his nose didn’t really understand the size of the trust. A drug addict with a million dollars could go broke. One with a billion dollars would overdose long before that happened.

The heir’s addiction had been one Arthur wouldn’t have believed real if he hadn’t seen it himself. Nick was addicted to charity. Worse, not only was Nick Fucking Coyle addicted to charity, he had the kind of weird and persistent hatred of lawyers that it took most people decades of working at a law firm to develop.

Even that didn’t have to be a deal breaker. Arthur had quickly managed to convince Nick that he could do much more good in the world by letting the trust grow and using the income to fund whatever causes he deemed worthy. If Nick had let Arthur set up his charitable trust, it would have been a new and powerful revenue stream for the firm - millions of dollars a year in billable hours doing very low-risk work.

As for Nick’s irrational hatred of lawyers, Arthur had deployed what he thought of as a weapon of last resort, his doomsday device: he’d sent in Ainsley Davenport. Ainsley was the most beautiful woman Arthur Black had ever met who wasn’t a moron. Sharp-witted, ambitious, and unburdened by cheap morality, Ainsley had caught Arthur’s attention when she was still an intern. He’d made it clear that he could mentor and guide her if he liked her well enough and she’d spread her legs in response. Besides being sharp-witted and driven, she owed Arthur her whole career. She had been the stronger of the two candidates Arthur was grooming to be his third wife.

It had been a calculated risk. Arthur hadn’t been foolish enough to believe that either the career help or the promise of marriage would make Ainsley loyal if she saw an opportunity to do better without him. If she’d been a little less ambitious, she might have settled for her role as Nick’s primary point of contact in the firm. She could have befriended him, finessed him, possibly fucked him if necessary and done it in the name of profitability for everyone involved. After a few years, she would have made partner and probably even senior partner eventually. It had been as close to a guaranteed road to success as anyone ever got.

Even so, Arthur had known to watch for signs of treachery from Ainsley;, when he saw them, he’d been quick to go to Nick and to tell the young heir how terribly shocked he was to discover that one of the associates from his own firm was seeking to enrich herself at Nick’s expense.

That should have bound Nick even closer to Arthur. The idealistic young idiot should have seen Arthur as a protector and an advisor looking out for his best interests. By now, they could have been close friends. But Arthur had badly underestimated how quickly and thoroughly Ainsley could get her hooks into an impressionable young man. She’d wriggled out of Arthur’s trap, gotten herself named Nick’s in-house counsel, and done everything she could to poison Nick and Arthur’s working relationship since then.

She’d been damned effective at it, too. Shortly after Ainsley had stopped fucking Arthur and started fucking Nick, the first round of asset transfer requests had come in. Those were to be expected. The Grayson-Stone Trust was such a mess of bylaws, riders, and addenda that it was nearly impossible to spend or even give away money without transferring it out first. New trusts were established and assets transferred to them. That those trusts were not set up by and would not be managed by Black and Stringer was disappointing, but hardly earthshaking. It wasn’t until Arthur was summoned into a meeting with a half dozen of the firm’s most influential senior partners and told that no delays in making those transfers would be tolerated that he’d seen his first big red flag.

The second red flag had been when Arthur saw the pattern emerging in which properties were being transferred out. Over the course of three weeks, Nick had extracted nearly every instrument with a high expected upside balanced against a low-probability but catastrophic downside. And while Arthur wasn’t privy to what happened to those assets once they were transferred, he knew enough of the coparties personally to hear that many of them had been sold.

Nick had sold off a US$32 million interest in an agricultural firm that could control 60% of the world’s tobacco market within ten years, a US$61 million share in a conglomerate that built most of the private prisons throughout African and South America, and an US$89 million dollar share in a firm that was slowly buying up failing coal mines all over the world. Any one of those positions could have made him hundreds of millions of dollars in the next decade. The last one had nearly scuttled the company and resulted in an anonymous call to Arthur’s office threatening to murder his whole family if he didn’t fix it. Arthur had been tempted to tell the caller to go ahead. He had no children and, by that point, his second wife had already served him with divorce papers. Instead, he told his secretary to give them Nick’s number if they called back.

When the rate of transfers out of the trust jumped tenfold, Arthur knew it was time to go. Obviously, Nick was going to pull every dollar he could out of the Grayson-Stone Trust and put it all into the new trusts Ainsley had set up for him. Transferring most of the assets from the Grayson-Stone Trust into something easier to manage was actually something Arthur had once planned to suggest to the heir himself. The taxes, regulatory penalties, and triggered payouts of such a move would have totalled around a hundred million dollars and Vanessa’s team would have lost all but a trickle of its revenue, but it would have unencumbered Arthur’s ability to make money in several crucial ways banned by the existing bylaws. Of course, when Arthur had imagined suggesting such a move, he’d assumed it would be into a new trust that he also managed.

The biggest, reddest flag had come when Arthur called a meeting with five of the six same most senior partners who’d told him he wasn’t allowed to manage thirty percent of the properties in the portfolio he was being paid to manage. He would have invited Sid Stringer as well, but the old man had died of pneumonia earlier in the year. Even so, the symbolism was deliberate and clear. Arthur was now in a position to call his own shots and demand the presence of those who had previously demanded his.

He’d practiced the speech and, as a result, knew that it was exactly fifteen minutes long and took 34 slides to illustrate. It covered the history of Black and Stringer managing the Grayson-Stone Trust, how essential the trust had been to Black and Stringer’s growth throughout its lifetime, and how Arthur and his team had more than doubled the trust’s size in the last nine years. He’d then gone on to talk about the challenges coming now that Nick was draining the trust and moving the management of his assets outside of the firm. That left him eight minutes and nineteen slides to explain how Arthur and his team should be shifted to managing the assets of the twenty-seven largest remaining trusts Black and Stringer had in their portfolio.

They let Arthur get through the whole speech. The motherfuckers had even asked him questions suggesting they would implement his plan and drawing him out on his more ambitious contingencies. They had sat at that table and let him loop and loop the rope around himself - not just enough to hang him, but to smother him under its sheer weight. Only after they’d extracted every possible bit of value from the conversation did Victoria Hamilton say, “I’m glad to see you being so proactive on this. We’ve been discussing how best to reassign your team, but you seem to have done all the work for us.”

She let that hang in the air just long enough for Arthur to feel a trickle of real fear before adding. “Even if Nick takes out every penny he is legally entitled to, he’ll still be one of our largest clients. He’s explicitly asked that you continue managing the trust’s assets and giving it your full attention.”

At that point, Arthur hadn’t tried to argue or negotiate. He’d shaken everyone’s hands and thanked them for stabbing him in the fucking back using polite and carefully-chosen terms that couldn’t mean anything but that. But before he could do that, he had to listen to a long prepared speech that was basically a reminder that the firm owned his soul, his career, and his testicles if they wanted them and that the best thing he could do at this point was bend over and let them fuck him in the ass for the next fifteen years.

A lifetime’s experience at not leaping across his desk and strangling people who really deserved it got him through the next few weeks. Arthur smiled and commiserated and wished his team well as the firm scattered them to the four winds. He made a show of pretending not to notice that men who had built their entire careers on the foundation of his largesse now treated him like patient zero in an epidemic of airborne leprosy. He even went so far as to start talking about how nice it would be to finally get a real vacation. When his second-choice mistress followed Ainsley’s lead by leaving him for a man closer to her own age, he’d replaced her with a pair of morally flexible paralegals. By all appearances, Arthur Black had bought enough Vaseline to grease up well enough to make it through to retirement.

If he’d been a lesser man, Arthur might have even allowed himself to enjoy the relative ease of his new life. Authorizing transfers and trading the last few instruments in the trust’s portfolio took only a fraction of his day. He could have picked up a hobby and, in a way, that was what he’d done. Arthur’s new hobby was learning as much as he could about Nick Coyle and how small amounts of effort on his own part might cause the young billionaire disproportionally massive amounts of pain. And like many new hobbyists, Arthur let this new hobby become an obsession.

Monday morning, Arthur had sent a short, politely-worded letter to each of the men who might be considered his bosses informing them that he intended to take an early retirement as soon as he turned fifty, that he was giving them six months advance notice in order to ensure a smooth transition of his responsibilities to other partners, and thanking them for their support during his long career.

He’d worried briefly that sending such a letter would be too obvious and clumsy to get the desired result, but decided that the multimillion-dollar balloon payment he was scheduled to receive if he stayed until he turned fifty would be enough to blind the men who received it with their own avarice. It was a little over an hour later that he received the email letting him know that his services wouldn’t be needed after today. Since then, he’d been walking around the office acting like a man who’d finally put down a colossal weight and been reborn.

That had been enough to get him a going-away party. If Arthur had been of a more dramatic bent, he could have wrapped himself in dynamite and taken out half the firm’s senior leadership with a flick of his thumb. He doubted many of them had been taken in by him acting like a man who had lost his job, his edge, and his mind all at once. They were here because they knew he was up to something and wanted to see if they could profit off of whatever it was going forward - fatted ticks looking to squeeze out one more sip of his blood.

So, for the last time, Arthur Black stood and chatted with his coworkers at Black & Stringer. He smiled at their bon mots and laughed even more dutifully than usual at their stupid fucking jokes. He ignored the conversations steered carefully away from him like he was a sandbar on which they could only founder. He wasn’t left out. To the contrary, people jockied to talk to him, each hoping to get some information ahead of everyone else as if a few minutes’ worth of advance knowledge might make all the difference going forward.

After twenty interminable minutes, Victoria Hamilton called out from the front of the room, “Arthur, maybe you’d like to say a few words?”

Scattered clapping and cheering accompanied Arthur on his way to the front of the room. He raised a hand to acknowledge it and it stopped immediately.

“I hope you’ll all forgive me. I haven’t been in a courtroom since I was a first-year associate and I fear my eloquence may have atrophied a bit as a result. Stockbrokers don’t give you a discount for talking pretty when you call in your order.” Arthur gave his best self-deprecating smile and waited for the barely-polite laughter. Then he launched into the speech that was basically a rewording and reordering of what he’d told the most senior partners about the Grayson-Stone Trust. Onto the end, he tacked some mawkish bullshit about how rewarding it had been to be entrusted with such a responsibility, as if anybody had ever fucking trusted him for a second. He capped it off by reminding everyone how much they sacrificed for the firm and how it made them the best something something - even he wasn’t listening to the words coming out of his mouth at that point. Instead, he focused on his dismount, saying that the sunsetting of Grayson-Stone meant that it was time for him to step aside and leave the next set of great challenges to the young men and women who would build the firm of tomorrow.

A moment after he wound up, his nephew Dunston Black called out, “But, what are you going to do next?”

Arthur smiled at him. He’d come in right on cue and, as far as Arthur knew, it was the first genuinely useful thing his brother’s third son had done in the two years since Arthur had given him a job on the trust’s asset management team as a favor. Dunston beamed like his uncle had given him a prize.

“For starters, I’m going to see what it’s like to do nothing. I’m going to sleep late, explore, maybe get a hobby. I’ve always wanted to learn how to...”

“Will we see you at the opera maybe?” Dunston said, jumping in way too soon.

Arthur scowled at his nephew, taking his participation trophy away. “Not here in New York, not any time soon. I don’t even know if they have an opera in Shreveport. But they do have some good fishing.”

Of the half dozen people who clearly wanted to know what the fuck Arthur was thinking, Vanessa Comstock got to him first, intercepting him before he’d made it three steps away from where he gave his deliberately pointless speech. She took Arthur by the arm, drew him aside, and said, “Louisiana? Seriously? What the hell is there in Louisiana for you?”

She said it like she was trying to keep their conversation private, but Arthur doubted fewer than a dozen people had been eavesdropping. Speaking in the same hushed tones, he said, “I have some associates down there that I might consult for eventually - just to keep my mind sharp.”

Twenty minutes later, Arthur Black was surrendering his ID badge to the bored-looking guard at the security desk. He’d made sure to clear out anything worth taking with him earlier in the week. A quick getaway meant there was no more time for people to pump him for information he had no intention of sharing anyway. By only giving one salient detail, he’d guaranteed that someone would report back to Nick Fucking Coyle that Arthur Black was on his way to Shreveport.

At the same time as Arthur Black was leaving his office at Black and Stringer for the last time, Nick Coyle had left his own party early and was on his way to a secret rendez-vous. Suspecting that his own presence was the last bit of fuel keeping the festivities going, he’d asked Zola to make sure all the strippers and frat boys he hadn’t invited to stay had rides provided to get them wherever they were going next. Then he’d climbed into a car with Emily, Rosie, and Violet, and headed to the Blue Rose where the two former strippers were going to start teaching his girlfriend the fine art of “working a pole.” Knowing that his staff would find out where he was soon enough, he was careful not to lie, but he left the impression that he was going to watch the lessons.

As Emily climbed out of the car with Rosie and Violet, she kissed Nick on the lips. “Hurry back.”

Nick smiled. “Always.”

Violet gave him a look. “I thought you were going to watch the lesson. You can come into the club proper as long as we’re not open.”

“I would love to, but I have something else to take care of. I’ll be back in a few hours,” said Nick.

Once Violet had closed the door, Nick opened the partition between himself and the driver. “Damaso, if I give you an address, can you take me there without alerting SSCS exactly where we’re headed right away?”

Damaso paused for a few seconds, then said, “I can if I don’t need GPS to find it. Even if they don’t know where we’re going, they’ll know where we are. Once you get there...”

“That’s fine. I’d just like to give as little advance notice as possible,” said Nick.

“Please just promise me you’re not going to get yourself kidnapped,” said Damaso.

“I don’t think I will, but if I do, somebody should ask Gianna some very pointed questions. She’s the only one who knows where I’m going and she says she owns the place.” Nick gave him the address.

“I know the place. It’s about a five minute walk from Harrah’s. I can drop you at the address and then keep driving to the casino, park in one of their lots if you like. You can call me to come get you when you’re done,” said Damaso.

Nick wanted to say that he didn’t think that much subterfuge was warranted, but decided to let his driver take the extra precaution. “That’s a good idea. I’ll walk over and meet you.”

“You got it.” Damaso pulled out of the parking lot and got on the highway. After driving in silence, he asked, “Can I say something and, if it’s at all out of turn, you just tell me to shut up and drive?”

“Go ahead,” said Nick warily.

“I just ... hope you’re not sneaking around on Miss Emily with another woman. You should treat a girl like that right,” said Damaso.

Nick laughed. “I am meeting with another woman. Emily knows who it is and that it’s not anyone she needs to worry about like that. I will certainly let her know that you expressed your loyalty to her in no uncertain terms.”

Damaso glanced at Nick in the rear-view mirror. “Shit, I shouldn’t have said anything. Now I’m going to drive myself crazy trying to figure out who you’re meeting. Will you tell me who it was some day?”

“I could probably tell you now as long as you promised not to broadcast it into the hive mind, but I think I want to torture you a little for being more loyal to Emily than to me,” said Nick jovially.

“Hey, man. I was looking out for your best interest,” said Damaso.

Nick laughed again. “It’s fine. In your position, I would make the same choice. You’ll probably drive other billionaires around. There’s only one Emily King.”

“I’ve already driven other billionaires around. One night, I had two at once,” said Damaso proudly.

Considering who Damaso worked for and where he worked, it was pretty easy to figure out that one of the billionaires had been Jesse, but took a moment longer to work out who the second billionaire would be. Nick had the impression that Jesse came down here to get away from the family and had already wondered if his own visit to the city wouldn’t be seen as a breach of protocol.

Of course, Nick knew one billionaire who liked to flout protocol. “I’m guessing that would be Jesse and Threnody?”

Damaso winced. “Shit, maybe it’s better you don’t tell me any secrets ever. I shouldn’t have said that.”

“I won’t tell anyone, but if it ever comes up, feel free to tell them I was grilling you for anything that might give us a hint as to who kidnapped Jesse,” said Nick.

“I ... yeah, okay,” said Damaso.

“When was this?” Nick asked.

Damaso gave a worried look in the rearview mirror. “I shouldn’t have said anything. We’re told constantly not to talk about clients to other clients. Guys get fired for that.”

Nick considered dropping it, but even some small insight into Jesse and Threnody’s relationship could be worth its weight in gold. He said gently, “You already told me you had the two of them in your car. You might as well tell me the rest. I won’t let SSCS fire you for it. You have my word.”