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Valerie Feigen watched in near bewilderment as her husband acquired, haltingly, in fits and starts, a trait resembling tact. "There was a void after everything happened," she said. "Once he was proved right, all this anxiety and anger and energy went away. And it left this big void. He went on an ego thing for a while. He was really kind of full of himself." Eisman had been so vocal about the inevitable doom that all sorts of unlikely people wanted to hear what he now had to say. After the conference in Las Vegas, he had come down with a parasite. He'd told the doctor who treated him that the financial world as we knew it was about to end. A year later, he went back to the same doctor for a colonoscopy. Stretched out on the table, he hears the doctor say, "Here's the guy who predicted the crisis! Come on in and listen to this." And in the middle of Eisman's colonoscopy, a roomful of doctors and nurses retold the story of Eisman's genius.

The story of Eisman's genius quickly grew old to his wife. Long ago she had established a sort of Eisman social emergency task force with her husband's therapist. "We beat him up and said, 'You really just have to knock this shit off.' And he got it. And he started being nice. And he liked being nice! It was a new experience for him." All around, she and others found circumstantial evidence of a changed man. At the Christmas party at the building next door, for example. She wasn't planning to even let Eisman know about it, as she never knew what he might do or say. "I was just kind of trying to sneak out of our apartment," she said. "And he stops me and says, 'How will it look if I don't go?'" The sincerity of his concern shocked her into giving him a chance. "You can go, but you have to behave," she said. To which Eisman replied, "Well, I know how to behave now." And so she took him to the Christmas party, and he was as sweet as he could be. "He's become a pleasure," said Valerie. "Go figure."

That afternoon of September 18, 2008, the new and possibly improving Eisman ambled toward his partners on the steps of St. Patrick's Cathedral. Getting places on foot always took him too long. "Steve's such a fucking slow walker," said Danny. "He walks like an elephant would walk if an elephant could only take human-size steps." The weather was gorgeous--one of those rare days where the blue sky reaches down through the forest of tall buildings and warms the soul. "We just sat there," says Danny, "watching the people pass."

They sat together on the cathedral steps for an hour or so. "As we sat there we were weirdly calm," said Danny. "We felt insulated from the whole market reality. It was an out-of-body experience. We just sat and watched the people pass and talked about what might happen next. How many of these people were going to lose their jobs? Who was going to rent these buildings, after all the Wall Street firms had collapsed?"

Porter Collins thought that "it was like the world stopped. We're looking at all these people and saying, 'These people are either ruined or about to be ruined.'" Apart from that, there wasn't a whole lot of hand-wringing inside FrontPoint. This was what they had been waiting for: total collapse.

"The investment banking industry is fucked," Eisman had said six weeks earlier. "These guys are only beginning to understand how fucked they are. It's like being a scholastic, prior to Newton. Newton comes along and one morning you wake up: 'Holy shit, I'm wrong!'" Lehman Brothers had vanished, Merrill had surrendered, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were just a week away from ceasing to be investment banks. Investment bankers were not just fucked: They were extinct. "That Wall Street has gone down because of this is justice," Eisman said. The only one among them who wrestled a bit with their role--as the guys who had made a fortune betting against their own society--was Vincent Daniel. "Vinny, being from Queens, needs to see the dark side of everything," said Eisman.

To which Vinny replied, "The way we