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things and meet interesting people. If I do say so myself, the key to my success has been skillful management of the social aspects of the business: I’ll play the extra man when I absolutely have to, and I’m not averse to the odd cruise in the Baltic or Mediterranean on a client’s yacht, but I don’t overdo it. My female associates are extremely attractive, but I keep my pen out of the company inkwell. I’ve had a couple of clients and clients’ wives make passes at me that would have to be classified as more than tentative; usually these can be dealt with without becoming deal-breakers, but when it’s been clear that’s not the case, the deal has been broken. Oh, yes, one other thing: I don’t stage or attend parties in stores.
    Which doesn’t mean my work doesn’t have its social drawbacks. I have to go to more charity benefits and awards ceremonies than any right-minded person totally in control of his or her professional destiny would put up with. Friends aware of this used to ask, “How can you—how can these people—suffer each other’s company night after night after night? Always the same faces in the
Times
Styles section?” You have to understand about the rich, especially those with newer money: it’s only in the company of people like themselves that they feel secure.
    All in all, my life is pretty much my own, which is a pretty high standard for a business like mine. I was brought up to know who I am and where I came from and what the good life properly lived looks like, mostly if not entirely thanks to my old man, so I have no need for the trappings of self-validation that so many of my clients crave. My household overhead is limited to myself and a twice-weekly housekeeper; if I entertain, I bring in a caterer.
    If I ever find Ms. or Miss Right, that may require some upward budgetary adjustment, but no luck so far—and by now I’m sohabituated to living alone, with every element just so, it may be too late. Still, you never know, do you?
    But enough about Chauncey. Let’s get back to Mankoff. You need to know more about him.
    After the CIA, he hit the ground running at STST and never looked back, a star from day one. Imagine Mozart being recruited to the Juilliard faculty to teach composition and you’ll get the idea. Within a month of starting at STST he’d found his true calling: risk management, which seemed closest to the kind of work he’d starred in at Langley. Within six weeks, he’d persuaded the senior partners to let him set up an independent risk evaluation department to ensure that STST avoided a repeat of 1987, when its huge bet on something called “portfolio insurance” blew up.
    His breakout year was 1998, when the foreign-exchange trading desk at STST ignored his red flags and lost $250 million in the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management. Even so, if it hadn’t been for Mankoff and his finger-in-the-wind risk calculations, the firm’s loss could have run into the billions, and he was delegated to represent the firm at the LTCM bailout negotiations.
    The reports that came back of the imagination and authority with which he handled himself only added to the glow. In 1999, when it was clear that the capital the firm needed could no longer be supplied by the partners’ personal fortunes, Mankoff did the planning that took STST public in the year 2000. Two years after that, following the 2001 dot-com bust when, largely thanks to him, STST missed the worst of the Street-gutting calamities like Enron, WorldCom, and Global Crossing, he became head boy. He was only fifty-five at the time, the youngest person ever to run STST.
    LTCM was merely the most glaring among several theory-based busts that Mankoff would spot before they happened. One reason that Mankoff had quit the CIA was that the agency was shiftingfrom operations to analysis, which is another way of saying from practice to theory, from what they call “humint,” as in “human intelligence”—spies in