Limitless

I could see that Kevin was having second thoughts about setting this thing up. He kept looking at his watch, as if he were working to a deadline and time was running out. He drained the last of the vodka from his glass at about ten to eight, ordered another one, and then said, ‘So, Eddie, just what exactly are you going to be telling him?’

‘I don’t know,’ I answered, shrugging my shoulders, ‘I suppose I’ll tell him about my adventures in day-trading, and give him a run-down of all the major positions I’ve held.’

Kevin seemed to be expecting something more than this – but what? Since I couldn’t offer him any satisfactory explanation for my success-rate, other than to refer to some inexplicable ability I seemed to have developed, all I ended up saying was, ‘I’ve been lucky, Kevin. I mean – don’t get me wrong – I’ve worked at it, and I do a lot of research, but … yeah, things have gone my way.’

As far as Kevin was concerned, however, this kind of ill-defined bullshit clearly wasn’t going to be enough – even if he couldn’t bring himself to say as much out loud. It was then I realized that there was an underlying anxiety in everything he had been saying up to that point, a fear that unless he had some inside track on my trading strategy, and consequently some leverage with Van Loon, he was just going to end up handing me over to Van Loon – and that then, effectively, he would be out of the picture.

But there wasn’t much I could do about that.

For my part, I felt pretty good. I’d eaten a plate of pasta in bianco after my disturbing spell of dizziness the previous evening. Then I’d taken some vitamin pills and diet supplements and gone to bed. I’d slept for about six hours, which was as much, if not more, than I’d managed in a month. I was still on two doses of MDT a day, but I now felt fresher and more in control – and more confident – than ever before.

Van Loon swept into the Orpheus Room as though he were being filmed in an elaborate tracking shot and this was just the last stage in a sequence that had taken him all the way from his limousine outside on the street. Tall, lean and a bit stooped, Van Loon was still quite an imposing figure. He was sixtyish and tanned, and the few wisps of hair he had left were a distinguished silvery-white. He shook my hand vigorously and then invited us both to join him over at his regular table in the corner.

I hadn’t seen him ordering anything or even making eye contact with the barman, but a couple of seconds after we’d sat down – me with my club soda and Kevin with his Absolut – Van Loon was served what looked like the perfect Martini. The waiter arrived, placed the glass down on the table and withdrew, all with a lightness of touch – silence and near invisibility – that was clearly reserved by management for a certain … class of customer.

‘So, Eddie Spinola,’ Van Loon said, looking me directly in the eyes, ‘what’s your secret?’

I could feel Kevin stiffen beside me.

‘Medication,’ I said at once, ‘I’m on special medication.’

Van Loon laughed at this. Then he picked up his Martini, raised it to me and said, ‘Well, I hope it’s a repeat prescription.’

This time I laughed, and raised my club soda to him.

But that was it. He didn’t pursue the matter any further. To Kevin’s obvious annoyance, Van Loon then went on to talk about his new Gulfstream V, and the problems he’d been having with it, and how he’d spent sixteen months on a waiting list just to get the damned thing. He addressed all of these remarks directly to me, and I got the impression – because it was too pointed to be accidental – that he was deliberately excluding Kevin. I took it for granted, therefore, that we wouldn’t be going back to the subject of what my ‘secret’ might be, and we – or rather Van Loon – simply talked about other things … cigars, for example, and how he’d recently tried to buy JFK’s humidor, unsuccessfully as it had turned out. Or cars – his latest being a Maserati that had set him back nearly ‘two hundred large’.

Van Loon was brash and vulgar and conformed almost exactly to how I would have imagined him from his public profile of a decade before, but the strange thing was I liked him. There was a certain appeal in the way he focused so intently on money and on various imaginative, flamboyant ways of spending it. With Kevin, on the other hand, the emphasis seemed to be solely on ways of making it, and when a friend of Van Loon’s joined us a while later from another table, Kevin – true to form – succeeded in veering the conversation around to the subject of the markets. Van Loon’s friend was Frank Pierce, a fellow veteran from the 1980s who had worked for Goldman Sachs and was now running a private investment fund. None too subtly, Kevin mentioned something about using mathematics and advanced software programs to beat the markets.

I said nothing.