The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [14]
“That you’re such a hard guy to whine to.”
I gave him a smile to acknowledge the humor in the remark. It was something I’d noticed—people were self-conscious about complaining around me. Almost no matter their difficulty, my hardship trumped theirs.
“I just wish …”
“What?” I asked, as he trailed off.
“I made mistakes back when I had Torino. My dad says that mistakes are contagious.”
His mistake had been trying to launch his own fund fresh out of graduate school, the way Walter had launched Cobra when he left the army. But where Walter succeeded, Alex had failed, as almost anyone his age would. His confidence had never recovered.
“You can’t change the past,” I said, repeating a truth I struggled to accept every day.
“Maybe not,” he mumbled. “But it’s like that butterfly thing. Everything might have been different.”
I leaned back in my chair unhappily. It was something I’d seen before—guys who got smacked around by the market, and who became obsessed with some specific event or decision that had gone the wrong way. Like the former high school quarterback who’d be playing in the pros if only the coach had let him pass more the night the college scout came around, they became convinced that everything would have worked out fine if it hadn’t been for that one unlucky moment. It was a level of delusion I hadn’t seen Alex descend to before, and if he’d been anyone else, I would have finished my beer and walked out on him. I’d spent too much time with drunken traders to have any patience for their particular brand of self-pity. Alex was different, though. It wasn’t just that I was grateful to him. I cared about him, if only because he so clearly needed to be cared about. I wanted him to be happy.
“Listen,” I said, reaching out to nudge his shoulder. “Can I be honest with you?”
“Of course,” he answered stiffly.
“You’ve been giving this job your best shot for years. Maybe it’s time to admit that the hedge-fund business isn’t what you’re cut out for. Look at me: I’m a smart guy, but I realized long ago that I don’t have the constitution to pull the trigger every day. And look at the people who are successful—a lot of them are just riding for a fall. Fifty percent of everything is luck. You know that. So why continue to beat yourself up?”
“You think generating return is about being lucky?” he demanded acidly.
“You think luck isn’t important?” I countered.
“For most guys. But what about people like my father? The ones who never blow up?”
Walter had thrived during the financial implosion, hoarding Treasuries and relentlessly shorting the banks. His success had burnished his already immaculate reputation to a godlike sheen.
“The ones who haven’t blown up yet, you mean. Read some history. Napoléon looked pretty good until he took off for Moscow. Anybody can roll snake eyes.”
Alex opened his mouth and then visibly bit back an angry reply, taking another slug from his glass.
“You should be focused on the political stuff,” I advised. “There’s a big opportunity for you there.”
He shook his head dismissively.
“Why not?”
“I’d prefer banging cocktail waitresses,” he muttered sarcastically. “That was the job Fredo got, wasn’t it?”
Alex was being both stubborn and stupid. Walter and his circle had left Washington alone until the late nineties, when a handful of congressmen made a halfhearted attempt to regulate hedge funds in the wake of the Long-Term Capital Management disaster. Once politics caught their interest, it hadn’t taken them long to figure out that it wasn’t dissimilar to the other arenas they played in, save that the trick was pushing money into the game without breaking any rules, as opposed to taking it out. They had a lot of money, and they were very good at working around the rules. Walter’s latest stratagem was to channel his coterie’s largesse through a new, ostensibly independent public advocacy group: Americans for Free Markets. He’d suggested that Alex become the group’s first CEO. Alex—predictably—had interpreted the offer as a vote of no confidence in his trading abilities, and sunk deeper into his