Blown Read online

  Bryan finished writing a postcard to his ex-girlfriend. He didn’t expect her to understand the message, but it also didn’t matter—she was already pissed that he hadn’t taken her on the trip. The idea was that she’d give the card to whomever the bank hired to track him down. He handed the postcard to the concierge and then strolled through the lobby. The architecture at the resort was open and breezy; it seemed that everything, the roof included, was made of rattan. He wondered if rattan was native to the Dominican Republic or if it was imported, like the chaise lounges and beach umbrellas—accessories for the globalization of leisure.

  Outside he was hit by a gust of fetid air. This wasn’t Martha’s Vineyard or the Hamptons, this was off the grid in the DR, and down here the air was dense with a salt-scented funk, laced with the distinct aroma of sewage. That was the thing about humanity. People shit. Every day. Everywhere. You could treat it with chemicals or bury it in the ground or dump it into the ocean, but just like money, the stench followed you. Which sounded exactly like something his father would say.

  Bryan nodded to several of the couples he’d chatted with the last few days. He hadn’t been antisocial; he was out having fun, making acquaintances, generously overtipping the staff. People would remember him and that’s what he wanted.

  A couple of middle-aged women on a girlfriend getaway waved to him as they went up to the buffet. He smiled back. He’d flirted with them a bit. No harm in that. But he wasn’t going to flirt with them this morning. He was starting to feel anxious.

  He wasn’t a big fan of the buffet. The food was exactly what you would find at a hotel in Orlando or on a cruise ship. Bryan picked up a plate and piled it with fresh fruit. He’d overdone it with the regional cuisine at the Caribbean celebration last night, eating a double helping of mofongo, a garlicky plantain mash that subsequently acted like Spackle in his gut. If he really was planning to spend the rest of his life traveling the world, seeing new places and eating like the locals, he’d have to get used to exotic foods. Or maybe it was the stress of what he’d done that was causing his gastrointestinal distress.

  He had no idea what they knew. It was tempting to log in to the InterFund server and check his email to see what, if anything, was happening, but that was dangerous. They could trace the IP address of the hotel. It was the same reason he’d left his cell phone in the apartment in Long Island City—he didn’t want them to track him down with that. He’d buy one of those prepaid phones when he got where he was going.

  The hope was the managing directors wouldn’t figure out what he’d done until they realized he hadn’t returned from his vacation. They’d suspect something, maybe an accident that left him unconscious in a hospital somewhere, or maybe that he’d cracked and gone AWOL. It had happened before. One bond trader had gone to visit his mother for her birthday and six months later turned up living on the streets of Varanasi.

  Bryan knew that eventually they would get around to unlocking his computer and going through his accounts. It would take them a couple of days, more or less, and then they’d know he’d ripped them off. If his plan succeeded, he’d leave this resort and have a few days to create a false trail. Then he could collect his money and disappear. Bryan thought he’d been smart about it, thought he’d covered his tracks, but he worried that he might have made a mistake, might have underestimated Seo-yun or whatever tech person they were sure to put on his case. Maybe they’d figure it out sooner. For all he knew, they could be on their way to the Dominican Republic right now. He reflexively looked over his shoulder and then, seeing sunbathers rubbing lotion on their bodies, heaved a sigh.

  Who knew being a criminal was so stressful?

  He’d justified ripping off the company a hundred times in his mind. They never hesitated to exploit the weaknesses of others, so why shouldn’t others exploit them right back? Just the thought of the little guys, John Q. Public and Jane Doe, investing their life savings in a rigged game—a system that sanctioned corruption and insider trading, a money-churning behemoth that spit out trades every nanosecond for the banks—the unfairness of it all nagged at him like a fleabite that wouldn’t go away. But then everyone knew that was the way Wall Street worked. People had seen the movies and the television shows; they’d read the newspapers or watched the human megaphone of Occupy denounce the corruption of the financial markets. Everyone knew it was a fucking scam, but nobody did anything: not the regulatory commission, not the Justice Department, certainly not the president or anyone who wanted to remain in politics for more than a week. But he did something. Bryan LeBlanc acted. He abused the trust of his clients, the trust of his employer, and he ripped the motherfuckers off. No matter what happened, that was the one thing he could be proud of.

  His colleagues would probably make fun of him for stealing so little. Why not aim high? Shoot for the moon? He hadn’t pulled off anything as lucrative and terrible as the subprime mortgage scam. That was a case of institutional greed, corporate perfidy where one group of people who weren’t so great at math exploited the mortgage industry and made and then lost a fortune. That was because the people who were good at math saw the weakness in the scheme and shorted the subprime market. They became instant billionaires. In the parlance of his colleagues, they killed it. Too bad the rest of the world was collateral damage.

  Bryan’s scam was smaller, quieter, and only affected InterFund. It was, he thought, an elegant kind of larceny.

  Bryan would issue fake drawdown notices from his clients, stating they wanted the funds moved to a new account. Bryan had set up bank accounts in Moscow, Copenhagen, Singapore, and Dubai. He would switch things up to avoid suspicion, opening accounts in various banks under his clients’ names, but all the accounts were actually controlled by a Portuguese lawyer Bryan paid a fat commission to. From there Bryan would play a shell game with the money involving a complex sequence of currency transactions that bounced it from account to account, country to country, currency to currency, until it discreetly slid into a shell account in the Caymans. It worked because his clients were all institutions and endowments and wouldn’t notice the transactions unless they did an audit.

  On a typical morning he’d borrow a few hundred thousand against one of his clients’ accounts and send it to Moscow. From the Moscow account he’d buy Indian rupees. After he had a cup of coffee, he’d swap the rupees for Singapore dollars—INR/SGD—that he would hold for a few hours. Then, if the Singapore dollars moved a pip or two against another currency, he’d swap them again, buying some Kuwaiti dinars—SGD/KWD. These he would flip into rubles—KWD/RUB—do a quick RUB/DKK, then deposit the money in a numbered account in Copenhagen. After lunch he’d take out that money, convert it to Thai baht—DKK/THB—and then dump the money into Hong Kong dollars, which would sit overnight in an account in Macau. In the morning he’d buy Panamanian balboas—HKD/PAB—and that money would be sent to a private Panamanian bank before being transferred into the account of a corporate shell company in the Caymans. From there he would have his proxy—a junior bank manager in George Town—snatch up as much hard currency as he could and deposit it in a safe-deposit box.

  Bryan wasn’t greedy; greed made people stupid. He knew that eventually the market would suffer a correction and the loans would get called, or that one or more of his clients would read the fine print on their monthly statement and wonder what the hell was going on. There was only a small window, a few months, to pull the embezzlement off. In the end he’d banked $17 million, more than enough to let him disappear permanently.

  Once he was out of the USA, his chances of avoiding prosecution were pretty good. He didn’t think the company would bring in the police or FBI; it couldn’t afford the bad PR that would come from a broker stealing from clients. And the clients wouldn’t take the hit; the company would refund all their money. No one would want to make a big stink, the firm would absorb the loss, and the status quo would remain status quo. Any admission of a problem, any sudden revelation of fact—it was too scary for people.


  Now that he was out of the country, he was basically free. Although there was always the chance that everything could go south in a moment.

  At the same time, he was starting to regret his decision. Why hadn’t he just resigned? Did he really want to live the rest of his life looking over his shoulder? Maybe he should’ve moved to some city like Nashville and opened a gourmet shop. Do it the honest way. They probably needed a gourmet store in Nashville. He’d import anchovies and olive oil from Spain, make his own burrata. That could be a nice life.

  Did all criminals have remorse?

  Bryan guessed that the sociopathic ones did not. But he did. Which maybe meant that he wasn’t a sociopath. That was good news. While he was plotting the crime, he’d looked up the definition in one of his father’s dictionaries. A sociopath was someone who was antisocial, with impaired empathy and impaired remorse, coupled with bold, rash, uninhibited behavior. Bryan didn’t think of himself as antisocial; he just didn’t like the douchebags he worked with. Otherwise he had a few friends. He socialized with the people at the sailing club. He went on dates. And while it was hard to empathize with faceless corporate profiteers, he was feeling remorse. That was proof right there.

  An onshore wind picked up and Bryan had to hold his straw hat on his head as he walked to the beach. He settled into a chaise lounge underneath a small thatched roof and signaled the waitress. Everyone seemed to be drinking cocktails with wedges of pineapple cantilevered off the glass, but he asked for a beer. A Presidente.

  One more day of vacation, and then it was time to disappear.

  Neal Nathanson sat in the Starbucks not far from his office and read the email on his phone. It appeared that one of the senior vice presidents had gone missing and, perhaps worse, might have misappropriated funds. Not a small amount of money either. The director of compliance wanted him to check out the broker’s apartment and see if he was there. Right. Like you’d misplace a few million dollars and then sit around your condo in your underwear watching reality TV on your new big screen. Still, it was his job to look into these kinds of things. He was good at finding people and even better at getting money back.

  Neal looked up when a lean and handsome lumberjack walked over. It took him a second, but Neal recognized the lumberjack as his ex-boyfriend Bart.

  “You’re wearing flannel now?”

  Bart grimaced and shook his head. “C’mon, man, don’t be that way.”

  Neal let his head drop. “Sorry. I’m just … You’ve been working out.”

  “Rock climbing. You should try it.”

  They were careful not to lock eyes, and then Neal said, “It’s pretty quiet around the house without you.” He tried not to look completely miserable when he said it.

  Bart stroked his beard. “It’s only been a couple of months. It gets better.”

  This was a private joke between them and Neal couldn’t help it, he let out a chuckle. He looked up and Bart was smiling. Neal smiled. “You okay out in Brooklyn?”

  Bart nodded. “Red Hook is cool.”

  Bart pulled a key from his jeans pocket and put it on the table in front of Neal.

  “Time you got this.”

  Neal took the key and held it. “I’ll keep forwarding your mail and stuff.”

  “Thanks.”

  They stared at each other for a moment, and then Neal said, “I’ve got to get to work.”

  Bart patted him on the shoulder. “You’re a workaholic.”

  “You always said that.”

  “Because it’s true.”

  Bart turned to walk out of the Starbucks. Neal couldn’t help noticing how he was rocking his tight jeans and an amazing pair of hand-tooled work boots.

  “Nice boots.”

  “Thanks. A guy I know in Brooklyn made them.”

  Neal hated these apartment buildings. They were built in a corporate style that made them look intentionally architectural yet bland. The buildings stood shoulder to shoulder across Battery Park City, like a massive fence built to keep the breeze from getting to lower Manhattan. If Godzilla ever did clamber out of the Hudson, Neal hoped these would be the first to get stomped. He entered the lobby and checked in with the security guard at the front desk.

  The guard called the management agent, who called the building manager, who told the super to deal with it. The super came out of a door behind the front desk and nodded at Neal.

  “You don’t look like a Wall Street guy.”

  Neal nodded and followed the super to the elevators. Why didn’t he look like a Wall Street guy? He worked on Wall Street. But then he wasn’t one of those clean-shaven, gray-suit-and-striped-tie guys. He preferred suede shoes to the crisp glint of polished leather, and his facial hair was scruffy. But he wasn’t a slob; he was wearing a sport coat and crisp charcoal-colored jeans.

  He looked at the building manager and said, “I’m on the tech side of things,” which wasn’t exactly true.

  The super, a paunchy ex-rocker who kept his thinning hair shoulder-length and lustrous, shrugged and waved his hand in the air like someone trying to disperse a fart. “I meant it as a good thing. I hate those douchebags.”

  The elevator doors opened.

  A silver skull with ruby eyes flickered from one of the super’s manicured fingers as he pushed the button repeatedly. Did the machine sense the urgency? The irritation? Or was the super a speed freak? Both of his hands were adorned with rings. One looked like intertwined dragons breathing fire.

  Neal counted the floors as the elevator ascended.

  The doors opened on twenty-four, and Neal followed the super down the corridor, catching a faint whiff of some kind of pheromone-enhancing body spray, like something you’d use to cover up the stench of cat piss. The super stopped in front of an apartment and pulled out an electronic key card. He looked at Neal.

  “Mr. LeBlanc doesn’t stay here too much. I think he’s got a girlfriend or something.”

  Neal nodded. “We just want to make sure he’s okay.”

  The super used the key card, the lock spun, the door opened. Then the super, like all supers in the city, held out his hand so that Neal could grease his palm with a hundred-dollar bill.

  “You want to come in with me?”

  The super shook his head and stuck the bill into his pocket. “I’ll be back in twenty. You find a body or something, just call 911.”

  The apartment was generic, like a suite in a Marriott. The draperies, the carpet, and the furniture were new and coordinated to appear tasteful and inoffensive.

  Neal gave the bookshelves a quick scan. It was a meager collection, mostly business books and biographies of former presidents. You could tell a lot about a person from his bookshelves; these told Neal that LeBlanc didn’t like to read.

  He walked into the bedroom. Typically, if people had something to hide, they hid it there. LeBlanc’s bedroom was even more boring than the living room.

  Neal entered the master closet and saw a row of suits, a dozen variations of expensive blue and gray, dress shirts still wrapped in plastic from the dry cleaners, and a selection of striped ties. Freshly polished wing tips gleamed from the shoe rack. There wasn’t a balled-up sock on the floor or a pair of tennis shoes.

  Neal took out his iPhone and snapped a couple of photos. He pulled a pair of surgical gloves out of his pocket, slipped them on, and began opening drawers; he didn’t want to compromise any evidence and, after years of experience, didn’t want to touch anything yucky.

  He carefully sifted through tie tacks, cuff links, socks, underwear, T-shirts, and unopened boxes of toiletries. There was nothing interesting. No concert ticket stubs, no condoms, no porno mags, no rolling papers, no sex toys.

  Neal pulled a small flashlight from his sport coat and looked under the bed. There wasn’t even a dust bunny.

  The absence of luggage meant that LeBlanc was still on vacation, but after what they’d discovered in his accounts, Neal was pretty sure LeBlanc wasn’t coming back.

 
A leather briefcase sat on the counter by the kitchen. He opened it and was unsurprised to see it was empty.

  The kitchen cupboards were stocked with a few cans of soup, a jar of tomato sauce, boxes of dried pasta—the typical larder of someone who ate most of his meals at restaurants. According to the expiration date on a box of instant oatmeal, it had become inedible six months ago. Neal closed the cupboard and took off his gloves. He couldn’t imagine anyone being such a neat freak. Had LeBlanc actually lived here?

  On the refrigerator was a picture of LeBlanc, looking windswept and handsome, with his arm around a thin blond woman. They looked dressed for a garden party, designer sunglasses and hands clutching Aperol spritzes, like members of some kind of Long Island aristocracy. The beautiful people. The golden ones.

  Neal plucked the photo off the fridge and stuck it into his pocket.

  Bryan rolled off the woman and lay on his back, gasping. His chest heaved as he sucked in air as if he’d sprinted up four flights of stairs. He blinked sweat out of his eyes and turned toward her. She was lovely. Her deep brown skin was slick with sweat, her breasts spilling to one side, her eyes twinkling.

  She laughed. “What happened to your nose, baby?”

  He felt the condom clinging to his cock like a diaphanous stocking, but reached up and touched his nose. He’d gotten sunburnt on the ferry from Santo Domingo. It was nothing terrible, but enough to leave small flecks of skin detaching from his nose and forehead. “I’m peeling.”

  She laughed again. “White boys got to be careful in the sun.” She had an amazing laugh, resonant and full.

  He watched as she got out of bed and went into the bathroom. Bryan thought about his scrawny girlfriend in New York. When they had sex she’d be on top of him, lurching and flailing like one of those inflatable figures outside a used-car lot. It was frenetic and not always enjoyable. And the sounds she’d make, the screechy appeals to some higher power; they’d flattered him at the time, but now it all seemed like a phony porn-inspired performance designed to inflate the male ego. Couldn’t people just fuck without turning it into some kind of showstopper?