Black Fridays Read Online Free Page B

life. My passport, the Breitling watch I had given to myself when I first made managing director, my platinum wedding band, now too loose to wear comfortably. And a half-dozen stacks of fifty-dollar bills, still in the bank wrappers. Enough to keep the wolves away until I could straighten things out with Angie.
    “Thanks, Pop,” I said, raising the bag in a nonchalant salute. “See you Friday.”
    He pulled away. I took a deep breath and began an inventory of the neighborhood.
    Change is the constant of New York City geography. The mark of a true New Yorker is how many evolutionary generations of storefronts on your block you can remember.
    The Papaya King was still there, but there was a big hole in the ground on the far corner where the fruit market had been. I looked up Amsterdam. The weird little store that sold perpetual motion machines and maps of the universe was gone, but somehow P&G’s, the local dive bar, had survived. Over the park loomed the Apple Bank, looking more like a prison than any of the institutions I had visited. And just beyond it, looking like some Austrian wedding cake on growth hormones, stood the Ansonia Hotel. Home.
    I bought the apartment in 1999—the year of the euro. My group of traders had cleared over $200 million on the conversion and I took home my first ten-million-dollar bonus. I got used to that quickly. I loved everything about that apartment—the neighborhood, the history of the place, the architecture, the way it was a condo but still run like a residential hotel, the commute (twelve minutes to the office on the express train across the street), and the tax benefits.
    Angie hated it. We met a few years after I moved in.
    “But why? I just don’t get the Upper West Side. Isn’t it all gay?”
    “Not really.” No more than the Village or Gramercy Park or most of the rest of Manhattan below Ninety-sixth Street.
    “But there’s nothing up there. What is there to do?”
    “There’s the Beacon Theatre,” where I’d been to see the Allman Brothers every March. And RatDog. And Phil Lesh and Friends. And the Dylan–Patti Smith show.
    Angie raised one eyebrow. I wished I could do that back.
    “All right,” I tried. “Lincoln Center.” I didn’t go there as often, but I had found it rarely failed to impress.
    “Oh, please.” Angie managed to squeeze five syllables out of those two words. “And there’s nowhere to eat.”
    “We just went to Cafe Luxembourg a month ago. It was your choice.”
    “That was years ago. I remember because Brooke Shields was at the next table and I thought she looked really young for being so old.”
    “That’s because it was Liv Tyler—who is almost your age. And we weren’t dating years ago.”
    “Really? You were so mean that night. You wouldn’t let me order champers.”
    “I didn’t let you order champagne because you were already sliding out of your chair from the martinis at the Monkey Bar.”
    Angie picked out our apartment downtown. I was too besotted to care. I would have bought her a planet just to hear her laugh.
    I never sold the apartment uptown. After the move, I sublet it. But a few years later, when the tenants moved out, my mind was on other problems. The place had been empty ever since.
    Room 811 was a one-bedroom—with alcove—in the southeast turret. It got tons of sunlight. And it was the only prime-numbered apartment on the floor. Some traders believe in luck, some in value, and some attach magical importance to various mathematical progressions. If a trader made money, I didn’t care if he read chicken entrails at Santeria gatherings. I wasn’t superstitious. Patterns of numbers revealed themselves to me without my bidding. I didn’t
do
it; I couldn’t help it.
    The lock opened too smoothly. Someone had been in recently. Probably my father, airing the rooms for me. He would have driven in from Queens and taken care of it, never mentioning it or expecting thanks.
    The apartment was smaller than I remembered