Prologue
Three Days in November 2003
It was 8:00 p.m. Monday in Hong Kong, 6:00 a.m. Monday in Chicago when Nancy Kissel called her father, Ira Keeshin. She was crying.
"Rob and I had a huge fight last night," she said. "I'm pretty badly beaten up. I'm sure he broke some of my ribs. And I'm afraid. I'm afraid he's going to come back and hurt me more."
"Wait. He hit you?"
"He was drunk. It was horrible..." She started crying so hard she couldn't talk.
"Where is he now?"
"I...I don't know. He left. He could be anywhere."
"How are you? Have you been to a doctor?"
"I'm going in the morning. My ribs are killing me. I'm all beat up."
"And you don't know where Rob is?"
"He could be anywhere. I'm scared he'll come back."
"How are the kids?"
"They're fine. They don't know anything."
"Are Connie and Min there?"
"Yes, they're here."
"Make sure they stay with you. And keep the door locked. Double-bolt it. This is awful. What the hell happened?"
Instead of answering, Nancy broke down in tears again.
"Never mind. Listen, I'll get down there as fast as I can. If he comes back, call the police. Stay safe. That's the most important thing. Don't go out anywhere he might be able to grab you. Keep Connie and Min with you. Call some friends to come over. I don't want you alone until we know where he is."
She was sobbing.
"Maybe he just lost it for a minute. Maybe he's ashamed, that's why he left."
"No. This wasn't the first time."
"What -- "
"Just get here, please. I don't know what to do."
Ira was sixty years old, five seven, physically active, physically fit. He thought fast. He talked fast. He was impulsive. He was not a long-term planner. He had a quick sense of humor. He had a temper. He had a heart. He didn't have much contact with his first ex-wife, Nancy's mother, but he'd stayed on good terms with his second, even after he'd married for a third time.
He was the number two man at a specialty bread company that supplied bread and rolls of the highest quality to many of Chicago's finest restaurants and huge quantities of lesser-quality product to such national chains as Chili's, Cheesecake Factory, and TGIF.
He arrived in Hong Kong on Wednesday night. He had visited Nancy and Rob there before. Nancy had said she'd have a car and driver meet him at the airport, but he found no one waiting for him. He took a taxi to Parkview, the multitower luxury apartment complex where Rob and Nancy lived. He checked into the hotel on the grounds, walked to their building, and took the elevator to the twenty-second floor.
Nancy was thirty-nine but looked younger. She was short and blond, flashy and feisty. She had lively eyes and a brilliant smile. Her shapeliness did not suggest that she'd borne three children. Heads still turned when she entered a room. Normally. Now she looked haggard and scared.
"Has he come back?"
"No."
"Has he called?"
She shook her head.
He started to hug her.
"Don't! Didn't I tell you he broke my ribs?"
Ira smelled scented candles. He glanced around the living room. Dozens of candles were burning. He thought he smelled lilac and vanilla. But he was too tired to smell straight, too tired to think straight, almost too tired to stand.
"Will you be okay overnight?"
"I'll be fine."
"Then I'll see you in the morning after I've had a little sleep. We'll go to the police, file a missing persons report."
"And an assault and battery complaint."
"That, too."
After kissing each of his three grandchildren as they slept, Ira went back to the hotel and to bed.
*********
Isabel was nine, Zoe six, and Ethan three. Rob and Nancy had arrived in Hong Kong in 1997 when Zoe was an infant. Ethan had been born there. Rob had been sent to Hong Kong to make money for Goldman Sachs and for himself. He'd done both. Three years later, he'd moved to Merrill Lynch to make more.
Ira had breakfast with the children while Nancy got dressed. He took the girls down to their school bus. They were thrilled by Grandpa Ira's surprise visit. Connie, the nanny -- or amah, as nannies are called in Hong Kong -- would take Ethan to his preschool later.
The morning was cool, the sky clear. November marked the end of Hong Kong's summer. In November, the daytime temperature dropped into the seventies and the humidity eased. The air pollution lingered -- the pollution never went away anymore -- but it was slightly less oppressive than in summer.
Ira and Nancy took a taxi to the Aberdeen Division police station on Wong Chuk Hang Road, near the Ap Lei Chau Bridge. As soon as they arrived and stated their business they were led to a conference room and joined by Sergeant Mok Kwok-Chuen, who was ready to write down the details.
But instead of speaking, Nancy started to tremble, as if on the verge of a seizure. Then she closed her eyes and began to rock back and forth, her arms crossed tightly in front of her, moaning.
Ira tried to calm her. She quivered and sobbed. Sergeant Mok was attentive and solicitous. Ira told him that Nancy had been badly beaten by her husband, who had then gone missing and who was still missing after three and a half days.
Eventually, Nancy was able to stutter a brief account of what had happened. She said her husband had been drunk and had begun hitting and kicking her when she'd resisted his attempts to have sex. Then he'd left their apartment and she didn't know where he'd gone. The account came out in fits and starts. Nancy would speak a few coherent sentences, then slip back into a state in which all she did was tremble, moan, and cry.
Sergeant Mok explained that he could issue a missing persons report, but that before Nancy could press assault and battery charges a police doctor would have to examine her and record her injuries. He said that could be done at Queen Mary Hospital in nearby Pok Fu Lam, not far from the University of Hong Kong. Ira and Sergeant Mok helped her to a waiting patrol car.
It was almost noon when they arrived. Queen Mary, the teaching hospital for the medical school of the nearby University of Hong Kong, was one of the largest and busiest acute-care facilities in the territory. The lobby was overflowing with patients waiting to be seen. The Hong Kong patrolman who brought Ira and Nancy to the hospital explained to a receptionist why they had come. The receptionist told him that Nancy would have to wait her turn. They sat and they waited. And they sat and waited. Nancy did not like to sit and wait under any circumstances. She didn't see why she should be made to now. This was the sort of thing she'd been putting up with for six years. The Chinese did not seem able to grasp the obvious fact that certain people should not be made to sit and wait.
Ira asked the patrolman how much longer the wait would be. He didn't know. Nobody knew. Nancy had already been waiting for two hours. She said enough was enough. She was a busy woman. The children would soon be getting out of school. She and Ira left. Maybe she'd come back tomorrow.
That evening, Ira and Nancy brought Isabel, the nine-year-old, back to school for a dance lesson. Like most children of wealthy expatriates in Hong Kong, the Kissel girls attended the Hong Kong International School, the territory's most costly and prestigious day school.
After Isabel ran inside, Ira suggested that they drive down the hill to Repulse Bay. He thought the quiet beach, the peaceful waters, the open air, and sense of space -- space being Hong Kong's most precious commodity -- might comfort his daughter. On the way she stopped at a 7-Eleven and bought a pack of cigarettes. Ira had never seen her smoke. "I've been smoking for a while," she said. "Rob hated it. Fuck him."
They found a gazebo at the edge of the beach and sat down. They talked about how sad it was that everything had fallen apart. Rob and Nancy had been married for fourteen years. They'd been in Hong Kong for six. At first, Rob had worked for Goldman Sachs. After three years, he'd moved to Merrill Lynch. He had an important job. He made a lot of money. He was planning to make a lot more. Nancy enjoyed the royal lifestyle of the wealthy expat. She liked to spend. Suddenly, all that seemed over.
Ira was perplexed by Rob's disappearance. Nancy said Merrill Lynch had told her he hadn't been in his office all week. He found that hard to imagine. Rob was obsessed with his work. He was driven. He'd often said he could not rest as long as anyone he knew was making more money than he was. But now? Ira sensed that divorce was inevitable. Nancy said she'd been living a nightmare all year. No matter how sorry Rob might be, she couldn't forgive him this time. She'd take the children and move back to the United States and let lawyers hammer out the details. Ira, an emotional man, began to weep. So did Nancy. They sat together at the edge of the bay, his arm gently around her because he did not want to hurt her ribs, and cried together.
They met Isabel in the parking lot after the lesson. They could not talk about Rob in front of the children. Nancy had told them he was on another business trip. He traveled everywhere from Mumbai to Manila, and he was gone more than he was home, so the children didn't question the explanation.
Isabel climbed into the backseat of Nancy's Mercedes and asked her to play the Avril Lavigne CD. Her favorite song on it was "Complicated." On the way back to Parkview she and Nancy sang along.
Why'd you have to go and make things so complicated?
I see the way you're actin' like you're somebody else...
They dropped Ira at the hotel. He was still jet-lagged and worn to the nub by emotional strain. He went to his room and fell asleep.
The phone woke him at 11:00 p.m. It was Nancy.
"You've got to come over! You've got to come over right away! The police are here. They're asking me questions. There's just so many police. You've got to come over right away!"
PART ONE
CASTING THE DIES
1. GROWING UP KISSEL
Rob Kissel was not only the richest and best-looking kid in his class at Pascack Hills High School in Montvale, New Jersey, he was also the most unselfish and considerate. He never spoke ill of anybody. He was as sweet to the plainest girl as to the prettiest. He never kicked anyone when he was down.
But the quality for which he was best known was competitiveness. Rob did not merely have a will to win: he had a need that bordered on the desperate. Anyone who'd ever met his father knew where it came from.
Bill Kissel, a New Jersey native, had graduated from the Case Institute of Technology -- now Case Western Reserve University -- in 1951 with a degree in chemistry. For twenty years, he worked for Sun Chemical in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Then he realized his true talent was entrepreneurial. He left Sun in 1972 to start a company that manufactured dry toner for printing cartridges.
The dry toner field was one of the many whose lack of glamour defined New Jersey. The state was the dry toner capital of America, if not the world. Dry toner is composed of tiny plastic particles blended with carbon. The smaller the particles and the more uniform their size, the better the result from the copying machine. The conventional method of making dry toner was called pulverization. It involved grinding the dry plastic from which the toner was made into particles of the smallest possible size. But that size wasn't small enough for a new generation of copying machines. Xerox spent millions of dollars in the 1960s trying unsuccessfully to produce a toner of smaller and more uniform particle size by chemical processes.
Where Xerox failed, Bill Kissel succeeded.
By jiggling a few molecules, he developed -- and quickly patented -- a means of creating dry toner particles chemically, instead of by brute force. His method created particles less than half the size of those produced conventionally. In the world of dry toner it was as if a new continent had been discovered. The companies who used toner-based print systems beat a path to Bill Kissel's door. For a few halcyon years, his company, Synfax, was the name of the game. By the time the big boys caught up, his fortune was made.
Bill's vigor was impressive. He played to win and he won. Acquaintances admired his tenacity and durability. He could be charming and gracious in social situations and he knew how to catch flies with honey, but he was not an easy man to grow close to. The moment he sensed a lack of acquiescence in a subordinate -- and Bill considered almost everyone a subordinate -- his eyes turned steely and his voice grew harsh. He was five eight, slim, and irascible. He had a reputation for vindictiveness. People said, "You don't want to cross Bill Kissel." He took pride in that.
He'd married a woman quite his opposite in every way. Elaine Kissel was warm and welcoming and a testament to the likelihood that Bill possessed virtues not readily apparent to outsiders. She was the velvet glove on Bill's fist of steel. Elaine nurtured while Bill harangued. She offered safe haven and solace.
They had three children: Andrew, born in 1960; Robert, born in 1963, and Jane, born in 1968. Elaine made the family while Bill made the money that gave the family a standard of living he approved of.
For many years, the Kissels lived in a comfortable house on a quiet street in the pleasant northern New Jersey town of Woodcliff Lake. But when Bill struck it rich he wanted more. He bought a grandiose mansion in Upper Saddle River. It was built on two acres of land and contained 7,500 square feet of living space. It was so big that family members spoke to one another by intercom. Visiting friends got lost in its maze of corridors.
Richard Nixon lived around the corner. He would come down to the bottom of his driveway on Halloween and hand candy to trick-or-treaters through the gate.
Bill acquired a yacht, a Cadillac Seville, a Mercedes-Benz convertible -- and the list went on. But they were mere toys. The possession he cared about most was his multimillion-dollar vacation house at the Stratton Mountain Ski Resort in Vermont.
Bill was a skier, so he determined that the family would ski. And they would learn to ski well enough to please him. Every winter weekend he put his wife and his children in his Cadillac and hauled them up to Stratton Mountain, whether they liked it or not. Except for Andrew, they learned to like it.
To Bill, no offense was minor. For reasons no one ever understood -- he didn't like to talk about his own childhood in a second-generation Austrian-Jewish immigrant family -- there was more vengeance than forgiveness in his heart. He had come to believe early on that a man did things for money, not for love, and that he had better do them right the first time. Someone had taught him that second chances were for sissies. Someone had taught him that the father set the standards and that it was the job of the sons to measure up without complaint. Someone had taught him that failure must be greeted with contempt. Elaine tried to shield the children from Bill's anger, but the oldest, Andy, bore the brunt.
He started out as a bright little boy but grew into an angry, sullen teenager, almost as hard to live with as his father was. Rob would be in the living room with a girlfriend when Andy would come into the house. Rob would say hello. Andy would say, "Fuck you," and walk into his bedroom and slam the door. His favorite song in high school was Harry Chapin's "Cat's in the Cradle," about a father who never had time for his son: I'm gonna be like you, Dad./ You know I'm gonna be like you...
There had been no family meeting at which Bill announced that he was stripping his hopes and dreams from Andy's chest and pinning them on Rob's instead, but by the time Rob entered high school everyone in the family had no doubt that this had occurred. Somehow, Rob shouldered the burden. His competitive instinct -- primal in its force -- drove him on.
In the classroom, however, Rob's killer instinct slumbered. Bill blamed the school. He withdrew Rob from Pascack Hills and sent him to the Saddle River Day School for senior year. Rob improved his academic record at Saddle River, but his transcript still lacked the preternatural sheen that might have caught the eyes of Ivy League admissions officers. At Bill's urging, he went to the University of Rochester to prepare for a career in engineering.
Rob did well at Rochester. He pledged Psi Upsilon, which had been Horatio Alger's fraternity. Even there, his competitiveness set him apart. He never did anything casually. If scores were being kept, Rob's had to be highest. His favorite song was Neil Young's "Old Man." Old man, look at my life,/ I'm a lot like you were...
He graduated in 1986, having decided on a career in finance, not engineering. Finance meant Wall Street, which meant New York. For anyone who grew up on the Jersey side, New York was Xanadu. It was the land of hopes and dreams, the fast track, the big league, the epicenter. It was where you went to find out who you were and to discover what you might become. Rob looked across the river with longing. It was the late 1980s and Wall Street was overflowing with young men making millions before the ink on their grad school diplomas was dry. When the wind was blowing in the right direction, Rob thought he could actually smell the money.
He was the kid with his face pressed against the glass of the candy store window. But Rob didn't just want to buy candy. He was Bill's son. He wanted to own the store. In 1987, after a tense year spent working for his father at Synfax, he enrolled in New York University's Leonard N. Stern School of Business. Two weeks before classes started, he and a Psi U brother named Mike Paradise flew to the Club Med Turkoise in the Caribbean Turks and Caicos islands.
Turkoise was not for the prim and proper. Club Med's brochures explained that it had been designed for "travelers in their twenties and thirties who enjoy making friends on vacation and value communal fun." The message seemed to be: clothing optional, drugs permitted, sex guaranteed. Rob was twenty-three, handsome, and single. What could be better than that?
2. GIRL OF THE GOLDEN WEST
On a warm and sunny saturday in the spring of 1966, a young couple from the nearby suburban town of Wyoming, Ohio, drove into downtown Cincinnati to have lunch, stroll a bit, and do some shopping.
Cigarettes had begun to carry warning labels, John Lennon had said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, and the United States had started bombing North Vietnam with B-52s. The Sound of Music had just won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Bonanza was the most popular program on television. In Cincinnati, despite another dazzling display from Oscar Robertson, the Royals had been eliminated in the first round of the NBA playoffs. In baseball, with young Pete Rose nearing his prime, the Cincinnati Reds were hoping for another first division finish.
Ira Keeshin and his wife, the former Jean Stark, were not much older than Pete Rose. They had met as students at Grinnell College in Iowa in 1960, when Ira was a sophomore and Jean a freshman. Jean got pregnant. They got married. They transferred to Michigan State, from which Ira graduated with a degree from the School of Hotel, Restaurant, and Institutional Management.
Jean Stark came from one of Cincinnati's wealthiest families. Her mother was a Lazarus, as in Lazarus department stores, which dominated the retail market in the Midwest. Lazarus stores had been around for more than a hundred years. They were the first department stores in the country to install escalators. Later, they were first to become air-conditioned. In 1939, Jean's grandfather, Fred Lazarus, Jr., persuaded President Franklin D. Roosevelt to fix the date of Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday in November rather than the last, in order to assure a longer Christmas shopping season. Eventually, Lazarus would merge with the Federated chain, which would drop the Lazarus name in favor of Macy's, but in the mid-1960s it was hard to find a department store in Ohio that the Lazarus family did not own.
Ira and Jean moved to Cincinnati in 1966 so Ira could join the family business. They made an attractive couple. The Lazarus family had high hopes for them. Ira was revitalizing the department store restaurants and Jean, despite what the family considered some worrisome liberal tendencies, was about to become the first Jewish member of the Junior League of Cincinnati. They had two young daughters, Laura and Nancy, and they saw no clouds on their horizon.
On this particular Saturday, Ira and Jean were shopping at Closson's, a Cincinnati institution almost as integral to city life as were the Lazarus stores. For almost a hundred years, Closson's had housed the city's finest art gallery. Among Cincinnati's moneyed classes, there was a feeling that if it didn't come from Closson's, it wasn't art. Ira and Jean were looking for a Mother's Day present for Ira's mother. They were drawn to a grouping of lead statuettes created by a local artist named Lattimer. One, in particular, caught their eyes.
It was eight inches high, weighed eight pounds, and portrayed two young girls sitting face to face, as if in a garden. Rising from a two-inch base of solid lead, the figurines suggested both the closeness of sisters and the innocence of childhood.
To Ira and Jean, the two girls on the statuette represented their own two daughters, Laura and Nancy. They bought the statuette and gave it to Ira's mother for Mother's Day. It became the object she cherished most for the rest of her life.
Like a lot of marriages begun with an unplanned pregnancy, Ira and Jean's eventually ran aground. They divorced in 1977. Laura was fourteen and Nancy was twelve, and the divorce sent the two girls tumbling out of the world of privilege and stability, the only one they'd ever known.
By then, Ira owned the Wheel Café, which was even more of a downtown Cincinnati landmark than Closson's. The Wheel Café had anchored Fountain Square for longer than anybody could remember. Generations of politicians had clustered around its varnished tables to share their dreams and plot their schemes. Although Ira was proud to own this piece of Cincinnati history, after the divorce he worried that Jean's family might cast a pall on its future. He sold the restaurant and went to Minneapolis to become concessions manager at the new Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome.
Jean felt liberated by the divorce. Despite her Junior League membership, she had the heart of a hippie. Her family's wealth oppressed her. She found Cincinnati society suffocating. She yearned for space in which she could develop her artistic sensibility and her inner self. She moved to California with Laura and Nancy, eventually settling in the small town of Piedmont, in the hills just beyond Berkeley. She left behind all the Lazarus family money and support.
Jean's first problem as a single mother was finding work. It was not one she ever fully resolved. She had not graduated from college, nor had she ever developed marketable skills. Women in the Lazarus family had not been encouraged to do either. Aware that she could not support herself and her daughters as an artist manqué, she tried repeatedly to plug herself into the workforce. She either quit or was fired from countless office jobs. She had a brittle nature not well suited to the give and take of an office environment. She quarreled easily and often. She was intelligent and articulate, but neither equanimity nor resilience was among her strengths.
She developed an anxiety disorder. She slumped into debilitating periods of depression. She came to recognize that she was not a very good mother. Her own mother had been so disabled by alcohol and had collapsed in so many public places that the family had put the word out that she was epileptic. Jean herself had never experienced mothering, and found that she had little aptitude for it.
Despite her best efforts, she didn't cope well with Laura and Nancy's teenage years. In search of stability herself, she wasn't able to provide it for her daughters, and her attempts to bond with them never got beyond smoking pot in the kitchen. The girls started building their own lives. Laura married young and moved away. Nancy had a hard time at Piedmont High. She acted out. She snorted coke. She slept around. She was effusive one minute, angry the next. She found it difficult to channel her energies. She was bossy and loud, lewd and crude. She was either the leader of a group or she quit it. It was her way or the highway.
What Nancy had going for her were her looks. She was a knockout. She stood a full-breasted five foot four, dyed her hair blond, and made ample portions of her firm and shapely legs available for viewing. Her manner fluctuated between brash and insouciant. She was quick, sharp, and funny. She did not shy from attention and she paid attention to the impression she made. She had a provocatively dirty mouth and talked as if there was nothing she was afraid to try.
She had artistic talent but little discipline. She was no more likely to last through four years of college than she was to fly to the moon. She made a pass at junior college, followed by a halfhearted attempt to enroll in a Los Angeles art school. She and her mother reached the conclusion that they'd both be better off if Nancy left home. She moved to Minneapolis to live with her father. He'd remarried and had a five-year-old son. His new wife welcomed Nancy with genuine warmth.
Ira encouraged her to try college again. Without enthusiasm, she enrolled at the University of Minnesota, where winter arrived on the heels of Labor Day. Students wrapped in parkas and scarves walked through tunnels to get to class because it was too cold aboveground. Bob Dylan had lasted only a semester at the University of Minnesota, and Nancy did not outdo him. She disliked her classes, her classmates, the darkness, the cold, and the snow. Midway through her second semester, she put together a portfolio of her artwork and sent it to the Parsons School of Design in New York. To her surprise and delight, she was accepted.
Parsons, with its campus in Greenwich Village, is one of the top design schools in the world. Nancy arrived in the fall of 1984, when she was twenty. She brought with her an inquiring mind, an adventurous soul, swelling ambition, and a body that was nothing short of luscious. What more did a newcomer need?
Bored by routine, she quit Parsons after a year. It had served its purpose -- introducing her to New York City. She got a job at Caliente Cab Company, a trendy Tex-Mex restaurant on Waverly Place. Her first job was as a "border guard," a hostess who escorted customers from the Mex side to the Tex side and vice versa.
It was a business where quitting time was after midnight in a city where a lot of people considered that late afternoon. Though the work pace was hectic, it couldn't compare to the cocaine-fueled after-hours social life.
Nancy had the looks, the energy, and the attitude to flourish, and she did. When she called home, her mother detected a hard new edge in her voice, which Nancy said was the sound of street smarts. She was flamboyant. She dyed her hair red, then blond, then red again, then back to blond. She partied fervidly. She attracted attention and reveled in it. New York didn't faze her. She felt it was the stage she'd been born to perform on.
Many of her dates were out-of-work actors. One had appeared briefly in Full Metal Jacket. Another had an intermittent role in a soap opera. They struck her as glamorous, but at least one of them actually struck her. It may have been two. Nancy seemed to enjoy telling friends that she could provoke men to the point of violence.
She had not yet mastered her own short temper. Often, it showed itself at work. Like her mother, she was frequently hired and fired. She'd win a quick promotion with her charm, then provoke a spat and get sent packing. From Caliente Cab Company she went to El Rio Grande on thirty-eighth street, from there to brief stints at three or four other places, and finally to Docks on the Upper West Side (where, to her delight, she once catered a birthday party for Imelda Marcos).
Wherever she was, Nancy came alive at closing time. She moved with what in earlier times might have been called a fast crowd: men with more plans than money, but always enough for cocaine; women who were smart, sexy, and unattached. In New York in the mid-1980s, she was living Sex and the City before it was born.
Although she tended to pick up and drop companions as often as she changed jobs, Nancy maintained her friendship with her ex-Parsons classmate Alison Gertz. Alison was the genuine article -- a Park Avenue socialite and an heiress. She came from a department store fortune, too -- and her relevant parent had not been disinherited. Gertz (later Stern's) had been the Lazarus of Queens and Long Island. Eventually, like Lazarus, the Gertz/Stern's chain was absorbed by Federated, leaving Ali's father even wealthier than Nancy's mother might have been.
In late summer of 1987, Nancy decided to take a vacation. She'd seen a Club Med brochure. The spot that caught her eye was the Turkoise in the Turks and Caicos. She persuaded Ali -- not that Ali needed much persuading -- that the two of them should fly down for a week of uninhibited fun. They arrived on a separate flight but on the same day as Rob and Mike Paradise.
3. YOUNG LOVE
They met on the nude beach. rob said, "i bet you'd look great with your clothes on." It was lust at first sight.
To Rob, Nancy personified everything hip and stylish and daring and free. She was New York, in all its sophistication, glamour, and allure. She was sparkly and saucy and had the street-smart veneer she'd been striving for. She was also gorgeous enough to make his pressed-against-the-glass-storefront, Jersey-guy eyes fall out. Plus, she was Jewish.
To Nancy, Rob personified everything she wanted in a husband. He was good-looking and hard bodied, clever and ambitious, well educated and smart. And, she soon intuited, from a family that was -- at least by New Jersey standards -- filthy rich. Plus, he was Jewish.
Neither of them ever looked back.
But neither did they charge ahead recklessly. Nancy may have been impetuous, but Rob was as methodical as a Swiss watchmaker. His heart had leapt impulsively, but his mind soon assumed full control. There was passion and romance and there were dreams of the splendor yet to come, but he laid out their future systematically.
They would date each other exclusively for a year. Then he'd move to an apartment big enough for both of them. Then they'd get engaged. By then he would have his master's in finance from NYU. Once it was clear that his future was assured, they would marry.
His first job was with a small, staid New York investment bank named Ladenburg Thalmann. This was not the glamour end of the spectrum. Ladenburg was a perfectly respectable establishment, with impeccable roots in German-Jewish society. But its heyday had come in the nineteenth century. By the second half of the twentieth it was no longer a first-rank player on Wall Street.
But Rob was now an investment banker and determined to live as much like one as his salary permitted. The first thing he did was move to a landmark building: La Rochelle, on Columbus Avenue and Seventy-fifth Street, where Mike Paradise and his wife were already living. Nancy moved in with him as soon as they were engaged.
Bill disapproved of Nancy from the start. He thought she was common because she didn't have a college education. He referred to her as "that waitress." Nonetheless, Rob and Nancy married in September 1989, only a few months after his mother died.
Nancy chose Ali Gertz to be her maid of honor. The year before, Ali had learned that she was dying of AIDS. The news reverberated throughout the Upper East Side. AIDS was for drug addicts and homosexuals; Park Avenue socialites did not get AIDS. Ali told friends that she must have been infected by a Studio 54 bartender with whom she'd gone to bed at the age of sixteen. The bartender, a bisexual, had later died of the disease.
Knowing she was dying, Ali made a choice. Instead of retreating to her Park Avenue apartment or her family's summer home in the Hamptons, she stepped into the limelight, hoping that awareness of her fate would jar others into taking precautions. Barbara Walters interviewed her. People magazine put her on the cover. Esquire named her Woman of the Year. She was privileged, beautiful, and articulate. Her speaking out about AIDS triggered a quantum jump in awareness that no one who had unprotected sex was immune. She would continue to speak until the last of her strength deserted her. She died in 1992. ABC broadcast a movie about her called Something to Live For, which featured Molly Ringwald as Ali and Lee Grant as her resolute and loving mother.
Nancy's choosing Ali to be her maid of honor seemed an act of love: letting a dying friend share in a commitment to life. A few ungenerous souls among the guests, however, viewed it as a grasp at Ali's celebrity coattails. On the morning of the wedding, Nancy and Ali and Nancy's second-closest friend, Bryna O'Shea, went to the Essex House on Central Park South to have their hair done and to put on their gowns.
As they were dressing, Ali began to recite a list of the pills she had to remember to take. There were uppers for energy, downers to take the edge off the uppers, dozens of high-potency vitamins, and, most important, AZT. She had to take four hundred milligrams every four hours and she wanted to be sure she wouldn't forget amid the excitement of the wedding reception. She started to explain that AZT was most effective in combating the HIV virus that was the precursor to full-blown AIDS, but that her doctor had said --
"Just shut up, Ali," Nancy said. "This is my day. Nobody wants to hear about your fucking pills."
The wedding took place at the East River Yacht Club, across the East River from Manhattan. Nancy wore a gown she had selected at Victoria Falls in Soho. The reception was held at the club's restaurant, Water's Edge, which offered an unrivaled view of the skyline.
The weather that day was glorious. A warm September sun shone from a clear blue sky. Guests crowded onto the restaurant's outside deck. The Manhattan skyline dominated everyone's field of vision. To Rob and Nancy, it represented limitless promise. A magnetic field seemed to emanate from it, drawing them into its mysteries, tempting them with its riches, thrilling them with its range of possibilities.
The bride and groom were radiant. They danced with élan. Their smiles were illuminated by joy. But Nancy later complained to friends that Ali Gertz ruined the day. All through the reception she talked to the other guests about AIDS. Whether she meant to or not, she stole the spotlight. She was beautiful, she was a celebrity, she would die young. Nancy felt that more attention was paid to her than to the bride. Nancy had no time for her after that.
*********
Nancy was not a forgiving person. She took offense at the most innocuous of remarks and found disparagement in the most neutral of comments about her. Her reactions were swift and extreme. If she felt a friend, or even a relative, had slighted her, she would cut them out of her life without a further word. And it was permanent. Nancy did not relent. In this, she was similar to Bill. No Amish church practiced shunning with more rigor than Nancy.
Rob and Nancy remained at La Rochelle on West Seventy-fifth Street. Rob liked living in the same building as Mike Paradise, his old college roommate, who by then was married and practicing law in midtown Manhattan. The two couples socialized frequently. One evening the foursome had made a dinner date, but Mike's wife canceled at the last minute, saying she was not feeling well. An hour later, Nancy looked out her window and saw Mike and his wife laughing happily as they climbed into a taxi in front of La Rochelle.
She felt as if she had been spat upon. She told Rob that not only was she never going to speak to either Mike Paradise or his wife again, but that Rob was not to do so either. So in thrall to her was he that for the next two years he did not say so much as good morning to his old college friend.
For their first anniversary, Rob bought Nancy a mink coat. Bill paid for it. Unable to express love in other ways, Bill sometimes compensated by bestowing expensive gifts. Rob made sure Nancy never found out that he'd bought the coat with his father's money. She was thrilled to receive the coat. It seemed to change her personality. For the first time, she acted truly proud of herself -- as if the gift were a reward for accomplishment. She glowed when she wore it and she wore it everywhere, nine months a year. At restaurants, she did not check it. Instead, she draped it over the back of her chair. The Madonna song had been written for her:
You know that we are living in a material world
And I am a material girl.
4. LAZARD FRÈRES
Rob glowed like neon against the drab, gray Ladenburg Thalmann sky. He viewed his time there as an apprenticeship. It lasted a year; then Lazard Frères hired him. This was his big step up, even if by 1990 Lazard had entered a period of genteel decline.
Lazard traced its roots to the California Gold Rush, but its corporate culture reflected old-world -- some said outmoded -- attitudes shaped by the French billionaires who controlled it. In the 1960s and '70s, Felix Rohatyn's brilliance and flair carried the U.S. division of Lazard into the front ranks of American investment banking, but as larger, more aggressive, and more technologically advanced competitors muscled their way onto the scene, Lazard witnessed a dimming of its luster. Even Rohatyn wondered aloud whether the jaguar that was Lazard could survive among a herd of elephants.
Rob did not concern himself with such metaquestions. What he cared about was advancement. His competitive instinct had not waned. Even in a field where everyone worked preposterously long hours and where everyone was single-mindedly focused on the one goal that mattered -- making money -- Rob stood out. He knew that money -- enough money -- could buy his father's respect. This mattered more to Rob than he liked to admit. It might even have mattered more than he recognized.
Rob didn't have the polish needed for mergers and acquisitions. M&A, as it's called in the investment banking business, required an element of salesmanship in addition to the necessary number-crunching skills. Rob found his niche in the more predatory realm of distressed debt. The idea with distressed debt was to make money from failure, not success. It worked like this: you find a bankrupt company or one on the verge of bankruptcy, buy the company's bonds at a penny on the dollar, and use the resulting leverage to force reorganization. Then, instead of taking cash payment on the bonds, you take shares of the company's stock. As your reorganization turns the company around and it starts showing a profit, your shares rise a few thousand percent and everybody is happy, especially your bosses. At the end of the year, when you get a bonus ten times bigger than your salary, you're even happier.
The M&A stars and the ballsiest, craftiest, luckiest traders wore the crisp white uniforms adorned with epaulets and scanned the horizons from the top deck. The distressed-debt boys worked the engine room, out of sight. This was where Rob discovered his true talent: he could plow through thousands of pages of red ink and spot the single spark of life. He could find -- among the halt and the lame, the sick and the dying -- those few companies worth a bet. The work was more tedious than glamorous, the hours it demanded not merely unreasonable but grotesque. "I laugh when I think about forty-hour weeks," Rob would say. "I'm putting in forty-hour days." But he got results. He got such good results that he didn't even notice that he'd begun to cross over: he was becoming an investment banker, not a mere man.
The only reason people become investment bankers is to get rich. Not only do they have no problem worshipping Mammon to the exclusion of all else in life, they also lose the ability to understand people who don't. They tend to believe that the only reason other people don't become investment bankers is either because they're not smart enough or they're afraid of hard work.
It's a unique perspective.
In his splendid novel A Ship Made of Paper, Scott Spencer describes the breed. He writes that in lieu of happiness they experience "the grim, burnt comfort of thriving in a world that is, for the most part, brutal and uninhabitable." The investment banker, Spencer writes, "spends the best part of nearly every day surrounded by people who make money, not houses, or soup, not steel, not songs, only money, and who quite openly will do anything for financial gain....He has made an alliance with these squandered souls, these are his people, his teammates, and among them he feels the pride of the damned. His friends are the guys who will fly halfway around the world to convince someone to take a quarter of a point less on a deal. Everyone else is a civilian, all those fruits and dreamers who do not live and die by that ceaseless stream of fractions and deals that is the secret life of the world."
This was now Rob's world. He'd been drawn to it by the promise of outrageous wealth, but his years at Lazard added a twist: no longer was it enough to earn millions per year, or even to earn more millions this year than last. The only way to really succeed was to earn more millions each year than anyone else.
"What good does it do me to make ten million a year," he would ask friends rhetorically, "when the guy down the hall is making twenty?"
Copyright © 2007 by Joe McGinniss