pretty new analyst, and Ivor wasn’t happy.
After the risk manager’s visit, Perkins summoned Sophie to his office. The losses were still mounting, and the whole firm watched her travel the floor, as if she were a prisoner heading for the hangman’s noose. But she walked out several minutes later with a big smile, and Perkins followed her a few moments after that and instructed his traders to double down their bets. A jokester in the back of the room sent an IM to his friends: office pool: did miss energy just give the boss (a) a blow job, (b) a rim job, (c) a spanking?
The markets began to turn that afternoon, just after two-thirty when the New York exchanges opened. Word was out that Alphabet was making some large bets, and traders were spinning rumors. A little after three o’clock, Bloomberg carried a story saying there were reports that the Russian pipeline problem might be more than regular maintenance. At four, the first story appeared citing rumors that the pipeline had ruptured. Gazprom still wasn’t commenting, but anything Russian was getting pounded now, as the markets began to bet the rumors might be real.
Gazprom issued a statement at eight forty-five p.m., London time, as the New York markets were about to close, confirming that its main supply pipeline to Europe had ruptured. Full repairs might take three weeks to a month. There was a global trading frenzy. Alphabet’s positions, which at midday had been down three hundred million dollars, were now up by nearly three times that amount.
Sophie Marx had just made Alphabet Capital nearly a billion dollars. Stan Ferber, the chief Russia trader, went over to Marx’s desk with a bottle of champagne after the Gazprom announcement moved on the wires. He poured a glass for his new energy analyst, to applause from the traders nearby.
While Sophie was drinking her champagne, Perkins emerged from his office. People thought he had come to join in the celebration, but his face was tight. When he reached Sophie’s desk, he spoke into her ear and asked if she might be free for dinner that night, as soon as the closing bell rang in New York. He looked oddly glum. Ferber and the others pulled back and returned to their desks.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “You’re a winner.”
“This used to be more fun when we were making real bets,” Perkins said quietly. “It’s too easy playing with a marked deck.”
“So quit,” she said.
He stared at her for a long moment, as if he didn’t think that were possible.
23
Perkins wanted to get out of London. He proposed flying to Paris in his G5 for a late dinner. He would call Jean-Marie at Taillevent, who would hold a table for them. Sophie thought he was joking, but she didn’t understand: She had just made Perkins’s firm a billion dollars. If she spent a million dollars a day, five days a week, it would take nearly four years to work through that stash. Why shouldn’t she fly on a private jet to Paris for dinner? Money truly didn’t matter when there was so much of it. That was unnerving for Sophie, who had grown up wishing for the things that money could buy. But as she was packing her overnight bag in her room at the Dorchester, her phone rang. It was Perkins.
“It’s too late,” he said. She wasn’t sure at first what he meant. “My pilot says we can’t get a landing slot in Paris until tomorrow morning. He thought I was daft.”
They settled on the River Cafe, which was outside central London, but only barely. It was a stylish place on the Thames, up near Hammersmith. The interior was shades of blue, a sea-bright carpet and an aquamarine wall, set against the gleaming stainless steel of the open kitchen. Perkins was a regular; he went to places he liked, where risk of a bad meal was low.
Perkins took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, and in the low light of the restaurant he didn’t look quite so much like the Pacman. Sophie had been wearing a tight, tailored jacket over a blue blouse. She threw her jacket over a chair, too. One thing about being rich, momentarily, was that you could afford to be untidy. She was a handsome woman: supple, bright-eyed, her face always on the verge of a mischievous smile. And on this evening, relaxing in the afterglow of a successful day, he was a handsome man: shy in the way that famous people are, looking for the things in life that didn’t have a price tag.
Perkins knew the menu, and he ordered everything he thought she would like: roasted yellow peppers; bruschetta with wild oregano; risotto with white peach; and grilled fishes whose Italian names, spiedino and branzino, made them sound much tastier than monkfish and sea bass. He couldn’t resist ordering another lovely bottle, this one from the Alto Adige. It wasn’t like Sophie to allow herself to be spoiled, but she acceded quite happily in this case, and devoured what was put before her.
“Tell me about Sophie Marx, if that’s permitted,” said Perkins. “I don’t know anything about you, except that you seem awfully good at your job.”
“‘The CIA-we make a world of difference.’ That’s the slogan the recruiters use.”
“And does it? Make a difference, I mean.”
“Enough to keep me interested. I’m sort of an action junkie. And I like keeping secrets. I’ve had lots of practice.”
“You still haven’t told me anything. Where did you grow up? Let’s start there. That’s not classified, is it?”
“In Florida, mostly. And then in St. Croix for a while. And then I ran away from home. Just your normal childhood.”
“I think you’re going to have to explain yourself, madam.”
“I never explain myself.”
But then she did. In the flush of that summer evening, she told him the story that she never told anyone outside work. She trusted him, for reasons she only half understood. She sensed that he was caught, like her, in a world in which he was successful but not entirely happy. He was chasing a glowing filament that receded even as he advanced. Perkins was a good listener, and he let her tell the tale.
“My parents were hippies, sort of,” she began. “They were on the run. I was never sure who from, the cops or the FBI, or just from normal people. And they pulled me along with them. We had a lot of things we couldn’t talk about with anybody. I guess that’s how I got started with the secrecy thing.”
“What was your mother like? She wasn’t a spy, I take it.”
“Do you really want to know? This is private, and it’s sort of embarrassing.”
“Yes, I really want to know. I want to understand what makes a woman turn out like you.”
“My mother was a rebel. She looked like those sixties pictures you see of beautiful girls at Woodstock, or Joni Mitchell album covers. And she was a daredevil. If you told her she couldn’t do something, then she had to do it. Unfortunately, she had a habit of wandering off. I thought she wanted to get away from me and my father, but she said she was just a free spirit. When she was having a good time, she forgot about going home.”
“Would she come back?”
“Usually, but sometimes it took a while. I had to take care of things while she was gone. Cook, and do the shopping, and pay the bills. And take care of my dad when he was blue. I was like Junior Mom. No wonder I’m weird, right?”
“You’re not weird in the slightest. I’m sorry to break that to you. What was he like, your father?”
“He was a dreamer. A romantic, I guess. He was very handsome, sort of impulsive. He did his share of bed- hopping, too. His big problem was that he wasn’t very well organized. He had gotten busted for selling LSD in New York when he was still at Columbia, and then he violated his parole, so we had to move a lot, and sometimes he used false names, and it was a big mess every fall when I had to go to school and we had to fill out all the forms.”
“Where did you live?”
“We started on the Gulf Coast, in Naples, then in Daytona Beach on the Atlantic side, and then in Key West. In the summers I would sometimes go up north to stay with relatives. But the school thing was a problem every September. That’s why we moved to Christiansted in the islands. Some of my parents’ screwy friends were setting
