Limitless

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, I slipped into an easy routine of supplying him with a dozen tablets each Friday morning, telling myself as I handed them over that I’d address the issue before the next time, that I’d take steps to contain the situation. But how? I didn’t know how.

Each time he came, too, I was shocked by how much he’d changed. That smack addict’s pallor had gone and there was a healthy glow to his skin now. He’d had a haircut, and had started wearing suits as well – though they weren’t anywhere near as nice as mine. He’d also taken to arriving by car, a black Mercedes something or other, and had guys waiting for him downstairs. He had to let me know this, of course, and more or less directed me to look out of the window and down at his entourage, waiting on Tenth Street.

Another thing Gennady did which annoyed me, was to shake one of the pills out into his hand the moment he got them, and then pop it into his mouth – right there in front of me, as though I were a coke-dealer and he was checking out the product. He also used to dispense the rest of the pills into a little silver pillbox he had, which he kept in the breast-pocket of his jacket. He’d pat this part of his jacket and say, ‘Always be prepared.’ Gennady was an asshole and I physically couldn’t bear to have him in the room. But I was powerless to stop him, because he obviously had moved up in the Organizatsiya, so how did I even begin to deal with that?

What I did was compartmentalize it, deal with it at the time and then move swiftly on.

I seemed to be doing a lot of that these days.

Mostly, though, my time was spent huddled in various offices and conference rooms of the Van Loon Building on Forty-eighth Street, with Carl and Hank Atwood and Jim Heche, or with Carl and Jim and Dan Bloom, the chairman of Abraxas, and his people.

Late one night, however, I found myself alone with Carl in one of the conference rooms. We were having a drink, and since we were close to agreeing a deal, he brought up the subject of money, something he hadn’t mentioned since that first night in his apartment on Park Avenue. He passed a comment about the commission rate we’d be getting for brokering the deal, so I decided to ask him outright what my share would be. Without batting an eyelid, and distractedly consulting a folder on the table, he said, ‘Well, given the scale of your contribution, Eddie, it won’t be anything less than forty. I don’t know, say, forty-five.’

I paused, and waited for him to go on – because I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant. But he didn’t say anything else, and just continued staring at the folder.

‘Thousand?’ I ventured.