“I’m being a prick, aren’t I?” he said. His voice was softer. “Sorry about that. I’m a little tired today. You get what you need here?”
“I asked my questions-you gave your answers.” He made a sound that might have been a laugh.
“And my wife-you get what you need from her, too?” The edge was back in his voice. I nodded. “Did you really have to talk to her about all that… crap? It’s ancient history, for chrissakes. How the hell does dredging that up help with anything?”
“I’m not sure it does,” I said. “But I couldn’t know unless I asked, and I had to ask. I’m sorry if it was uncomfortable for her.”
“It bothered her a lot less than it did me,” Pierro said. He shook his head. “I’m getting pissy again-sorry. It’s just that… Helene’s a good person, John… better than I deserve. She shouldn’t have to air her dirty laundry for no reason.”
“It wasn’t for no reason, Rick. And as dirty laundry goes, I’ve heard a lot worse.” Pierro’s lips pursed.
“So now what?” he asked. I explained my plans to find the five people Burrows had named. He nodded.
“And if someone else has gotten a fax too, then we know something?” he asked.
“Then we know something.” Pierro looked at his watch again, and I figured we were done. But we weren’t.
“I didn’t realize you were Ned March’s brother,” he said. I looked at him. “I know him by reputation, and I heard him speak at a conference a couple of years back-your brother David, too. Smart guys, the both of them. And Klein’s a hell of a firm-one of the last of its kind.” He chuckled. “I did a little research of my own,” he said.
“So I gather.” There was a trace of pleasure on Pierro’s face, at having taken me by surprise. And there was something more-curiosity.
“Tell me if I’m out of line here, John, but I’ve got to ask-coming from a family like that, shouldn’t you be running part of Klein or something? How the hell did you end up in this line of work?”
How did you end up in this line of work? Why do you do it? I’ve been asked those questions enough over the years that I should have some answers handy by now-but I don’t. Instead, I’ve got some vague crap that I mutter about aversion to desk jobs and not being cut out for banking. I trotted a little of that out for Pierro. He smiled and shook his head, incredulous.
“Christ, if I’d had that kind of family juice when I was coming up, I’d have been CEO at French ten years ago.” He looked at his watch and rose. “Got to get to getting, John. It was good to see you. And thanks, again, for everything you’re doing,” he said. And he and his good-looking suit strode out the door. I headed downtown.
“You’re not in here,” she said, and she stared deeply and with some consternation into the monitor that stood on her small metal desk. “If you’re not in here, you don’t have an appointment.” She was maybe twenty, and had a gold stud in her nose and another in her tongue, and was made up like she’d just escaped from the road company of Cats. She was tiptoeing her fingers gingerly across the keyboard, careful that no harm should come to her immaculate French manicure, in an excruciating attempt to locate me in Michael Lenzi’s appointment calendar. She wore one of those campy retro necklaces that had her name on it, rendered in gold-plated script. Brie. I stood a better chance with the cheese.
“Why don’t I just rest here while you look,” I said. She ignored me and continued her glacial typing. I sat down. I watched water drip from my umbrella. I looked at the wet leaf stuck to my boot. I listened as, every minute or so, Brie tapped a key. If she had to answer the phone, too, I’d be here till Christmas.
Arroyo Systems occupied part of a low floor in an anonymous building on Broadway, near Fulton Street. The reception area was windowless and small, furnished with a black leather chair, a matching love seat, a chrome and glass table, Brie’s command center, and a dead plant in a large plastic pot. The sheetrock walls were scuffed, and the carpet was worn and stained. A couple of the fluorescent ceiling bulbs were out, and the working ones buzzed annoyingly. Some dusty photos of canyons hung on one wall. There were a half-dozen old banking and software trade magazines on the glass table, along with last Friday’s Post and a few brochures about Arroyo Systems. These were filled with colorful but indecipherable diagrams, photos of smartly dressed people staring raptly at computer screens, and gobbledygook like “object-oriented n-tier message-based architecture.” It was impossible to tell from them what Arroyo Systems did. I started reading the Post.
“You sure it was today-Tuesday?” Brie asked without looking up.
“I set it up with Mr. Lenzi yesterday morning-for one o’clock today. Why don’t you just call him?” She looked at me like I was speaking Urdu, then turned back to the monitor. She was still delicately pressing keys and gazing uncomprehendingly at her screen when a wiry, intense-looking man opened the interior door and spoke to her.
“I’m expecting a guy around one.” He paused and looked at me. “Maybe that’s you. You March?” I nodded. “Mike Lenzi.” He gave me a hard handshake. I followed him inside. Brie noticed none of this, and we left her pondering her screen, pristine nails poised above the keyboard.
“How long she keep you out there?” he asked.
“No more than a week,” I said. He snorted.
“I don’t know where we get them from-Mars, maybe. And we can’t keep them longer than a month or two. We had one a while back- didn’t make it through lunch. Went out on her break and that was it, never saw her again. Took a laptop and a couple of wallets with her.”
I followed Lenzi down a short hall, past a conference room and a kitchen, to a warren of cubicles with shoulder-high partitions. We picked our way through them and headed for a row of offices along the back wall. The cubicles were densely packed with computer hardware and wild tangles of cabling, and every surface was covered with a thick, unstable sediment of paper, technical manuals, CDs, takeout food containers, candy wrappers, soda cans, coffee cups, and other stuff too deeply buried or decomposed to identify. The space was cramped and chaotic and smelled like a dorm room, or an airport transit lounge after a week of canceled flights.
I heard Russian being spoken, and another language that I didn’t recognize. Most of the people I saw were young and male. Nearly all of them were casually dressed, some in suit pants and dress shirts, some in jeans and T-shirts, and others in what could have been pajamas.
Lenzi was the exception to the dress rule. He wore the pants to a navy suit, a blue-and-pink-striped shirt with cuff links, and a blue tie with a red geometric pattern. He was short, about five foot five, with dark, curly hair that had begun to gray and recede. His face was thin, and his dark eyes were deep-set. The skin beneath them looked soft and loose. He was clean-shaven, but the faint shadow on his jaw meant he had to work at it. I put his age at forty-five.
His office was small and had too much stuff in it. The grimy window, with its view of an airshaft, only made things worse. He ushered me into one of the guest chairs and shut the door. He edged around me and slid behind his big, dark desk.
“Lots of all-nighters?” I asked, gesturing out toward the cubicles.
“Programmers,” he said, shaking his head. “Can’t live with ’em, can’t kill ’em. They’re a fucking mess-excuse my French. If you were a client, I wouldn’t take you past the conference room.” Lenzi shifted restlessly in his seat. He picked up a paper clip and started playing with it.
“What kind of software do you guys make?” I asked.
“Trading systems. For FX, money markets, and derivatives. We do pricing, trade capture, position keeping, some risk. That probably doesn’t make any sense to you.” I shrugged.
“How big a company is it?”
“Small. We’ve been around almost two years, got sixty people or so, most of them out there,” he cocked his thumb toward the door. “Couple of sales guys in London. But we’re getting there.” His optimism sounded more habitual than sincere.
“You’ve been here from the start?”
“Not from the start, but soon after.”
“You’re not a programmer, though,” I said.
He snorted again. “Me? No, I do sales.” He’d unbent the clip and wound it into a spring shape. Now he straightened it again. His hands were large and pale, with black hair and blue veins on the backs. His movements were quick and a little twitchy, like he’d had too much coffee.
“And before this-you were in banking?” I asked.
Lenzi bristled. “Whoa, buddy, before we start in on my resume, how about you filling me in on what the hell this is about?”
“Fair enough,” I said. “Ever hear of Merchant’s Worldwide Bank?” Lenzi blanched, and paused in his torture of
